What Entity Determines How We Adapt to Climate Change?

For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived 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 include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting 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 central administration support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Specialist Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. 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 public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about principles and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Strategic Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.