Which Authority Determines The Way We Respond to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Spanning the political spectrum, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.
Ecological vs. Political Consequences
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a surge 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 warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.
From Specialist Systems
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.
Forming Governmental Battles
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 divergence is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.
