Which Authority Determines The Way We Adapt to Global Warming?
For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Spanning the political spectrum, from grassroots climate advocates to senior UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Governmental Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 cut their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.
From Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that commercial systems 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 genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and mediating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited 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, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, 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 handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Transcending Doomsday Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome 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 existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.
Forming Governmental Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 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 price signaling to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks 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 which perspective will prevail.
