For decades, halting climate change” has been the singular objective of climate policy. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. 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 years of water scarcity 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 cut their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about ethics and negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but high-consumption, 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 stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 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 managed retreat through commercial dynamics – 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 discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.
A seasoned journalist with a passion for uncovering stories that matter in the Czech Republic and beyond.
