Which Authority Chooses How We Adapt to Global Warming?

For decades, halting climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. 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 threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields 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 links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.

Forming Strategic Conflicts

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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit them to stay in place 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 hides a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.