What Entity Determines The Way We Adjust to Global Warming?

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing ignores questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government guarantee 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 hypothetical. 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 endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Specialist Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, 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 democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but high-consumption, 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 transforming everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force 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 known issues made worse: more people excluded 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 Policy 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.