Which Authority Decides How We Adjust to Climate Change?
For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate politics. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.
Ecological vs. Political Impacts
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.
From Specialist Models
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the sustainable business 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 ethics and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Doomsday Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, 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 destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.
Developing Governmental Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates 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 discarded. But the sole concentration 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 which perspective will succeed.
