Who Determines How We Adapt to Global Warming?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and land use policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Natural vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. 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 endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. 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 decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode completely opposing 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.
Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism 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 fights about principles and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced 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 moving for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming 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 materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people priced 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 connected to existing societal conflicts.
Emerging Governmental Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that enable 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: 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.
