Who Determines The Way We Respond to Environmental Shifts?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to senior UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.
Ecological vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence 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? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.
From Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned 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 public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields 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 links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Transcending Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.
Developing Strategic Battles
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.
