What Entity Determines How We Respond to Climate Change?
For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary objective of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to senior UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, aquatic and territorial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Environmental vs. Governmental Consequences
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing ignores questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.
From Expert-Led Systems
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Doomsday Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm 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 familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.
Developing Policy Debates
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 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 divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.