Which Authority Decides The Way We Adjust to Global Warming?

For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Spanning the ideological range, from local climate campaigners to high-level UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and spatial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 vulnerable areas 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 achieving an agreement to fit 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 political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Forming Governmental Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.