Which Authority Determines How We Respond to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Environmental vs. Political Consequences
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.
From Technocratic Models
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Doomsday Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.
Emerging Policy Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.
