Which Authority Chooses How We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate policies.
Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Societal Impacts
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 cut their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.
From Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the sustainable business 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit 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 completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Transcending Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject 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 blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.
Emerging Governmental Debates
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.
