Which Authority Decides The Way We Respond to Climate Change?

For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems 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 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 toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of 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 historic lows – 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 answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing 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 societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming 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 materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable 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 neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.