Who Determines How We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Governmental Effects
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 harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, 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 provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 reduce their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.
Moving Beyond Technocratic Models
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the green capitalism 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 mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and subsidized mobility 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 completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Moving Past Doomsday Narratives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm 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 known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.
Forming Policy Conflicts
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.
