Who Chooses The Way We Adjust to Global Warming?

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate activists to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate policies.

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 embrace debates over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids 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 act independently, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 cut their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage 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 arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Forming Strategic Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 cost indicators to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.