Which Authority Chooses The Way We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?

For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that economic tools 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, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

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 socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force 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 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Developing Governmental Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The difference is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that allow 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 obscures a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.