Who Determines How We Adjust to Global Warming?

For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Spanning the political spectrum, from grassroots climate activists to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Political Impacts

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 harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids 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 guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic 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 react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts 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 Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming 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 manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other dedicates 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 neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.