Who Determines The Way We Adapt to Global Warming?
For many years, halting climate change” has been the primary objective of climate politics. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate policies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.
Natural vs. Political Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will influence 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 backstop 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 laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
From Technocratic Models
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 rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.
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 decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Transcending Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming 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 known issues made worse: more people forced out 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 continuous with current ideological battles.
Developing Governmental Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other commits 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 hides a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.