Who Determines How We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Throughout the political spectrum, from local climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and territorial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Political Impacts
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the institutions 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? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic 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 answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Specialist Systems
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism 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 struggles about ethics and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond 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 completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced 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 existing societal conflicts.
Forming Governmental Debates
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits 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 neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.
