Which Authority Decides The Way We Adjust to Climate Change?
For a long time, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to senior UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Governmental Consequences
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – 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 embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.
From Technocratic Models
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy 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 principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon 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 familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.
Emerging Strategic Battles
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 high-risk areas 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 stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures 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 what ideology will succeed.
