Which Authority Decides How We Adapt to Global Warming?
For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular objective of climate politics. Across the ideological range, from local climate activists to senior UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate policies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a changed and growing unstable climate.
Environmental vs. Societal Impacts
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.
From Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already evolved past 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 growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating 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 emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but high-consumption, 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 stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy 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 familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.
Forming Strategic Battles
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: 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 prevail.
