Who Chooses How We Adapt to Climate Change?

For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary objective of climate politics. Throughout the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived 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 encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition 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 guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. 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 decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond 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 professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the sustainable business 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 values and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Forming Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks 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 succeed.