Who Determines The Way We Respond to Climate Change?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate policies.
Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, hydrological and spatial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Natural vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.
From Expert-Led Systems
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 economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Transcending Apocalyptic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware 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 forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.
Forming Governmental Debates
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other dedicates 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 neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.
