Beyond Seawalls and Solar Panels When policymakers discuss climate adaptation, the conversation almost always defaults to infrastructure: seawalls, levee systems, drought-resistant crops, upgraded electrical grids. The framing is seductively simple. If we can just engineer our way out of this, the thinking goes, then adaptation becomes a matter of allocating sufficient budgets and deploying the
When cities announce new seawalls, drought-resistant crop varieties, or early-warning systems for extreme weather, the framing is almost always technical. Engineers and planners present adaptation as a matter of designâidentifying risks and deploying solutions. This framing is not merely incomplete; it is ideologically motivated. Treating climate adaptation as a technical challenge obscures the political decisions
When policymakers draft environmental regulations, they often frame their work as universally beneficial. Cleaner air, safer water, and reduced emissions sound like public goods that lift all boats equally. But this framing obscures a stubborn reality: environmental policy does not land evenly across the social landscape. Low-income communities consistently absorb the costs of environmental degradation
