Who Chooses How We Adapt to Global Warming?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, aquatic and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Natural vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems 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 guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 install 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.
Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated 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 affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating 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 – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Moving Past Catastrophic Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting 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 appear 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 part of ongoing political struggles.
Developing Policy Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures 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.
