Who Chooses How We Adapt to Global Warming?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate advocates to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the central focus 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 solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and land use policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Governmental Impacts
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold 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 management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.
Moving Beyond Technocratic Systems
Climate politics has already evolved past 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 ineffective, the focus moved to federal 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 state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced 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 fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, 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 avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Transcending Doomsday Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.
Developing Policy Conflicts
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates 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 hides 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.
