Who Determines How We Adjust to Global Warming?

For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the primary goal of climate politics. Spanning the political spectrum, from local climate activists to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions 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 guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 decrease their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems 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 truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields 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 links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that permit 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 masks a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.