Who Chooses The Way We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate policies.
Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.
Natural vs. Governmental Effects
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 engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.
Transitioning From Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom 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 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields 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 associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Doomsday Framing
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware 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 devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.
Forming Strategic Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 complete governmental protection. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.