What Entity Chooses How We Respond to Climate Change?
For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from local climate advocates to senior UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, aquatic and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.
Natural vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. 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 prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – 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 specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.
From Expert-Led Systems
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning the green capitalism 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.
Forming Strategic Conflicts
The battlefield 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.
