Which Authority Determines How We Adapt to Global Warming?
For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the singular objective of climate politics. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to elite UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, water and land use policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Societal 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 harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving 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 react to these political crises – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.
Moving Beyond Specialist Systems
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that market mechanisms 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 any number of 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 fights about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.
Developing Strategic Debates
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that enable them to remain 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 triumph.
