Who Decides The Way We Adapt to Global Warming?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.
Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Consequences
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a surge 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.
Moving Beyond Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force 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 completely novel, but as familiar problems 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.
Developing Governmental Debates
The landscape 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 high-risk areas 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 stark: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.
