Which Authority Chooses How We Respond to Climate Change?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate advocates to senior UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a altered and more unpredictable climate.
Natural vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit 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 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business 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 conflicts about principles and negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the doomsday perspective 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 unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.
Developing Strategic Conflicts
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that enable them to remain 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 masks 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 whose vision will triumph.
