Who Chooses How We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. 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 risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

From Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that economic tools 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 genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Strategic Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 danger zones 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 pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits 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 neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.