Who Determines The Way We Adapt to Climate Change?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Across the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.
Yet climate change has come 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 encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.
Natural vs. Governmental Effects
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing sidesteps 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 federal government support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working 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 unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing 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.
Moving Beyond Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. 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 public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.
Emerging Governmental Conflicts
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 complete governmental protection. The difference 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 allocates public resources that enable 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 abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: 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.
