Climate Injustice

"Climate Injustice burns with outrage [and] is easily read as a take-no-prisoners indictment of the Trump administration’s celebration of fossil fuels and their complete disregard for the people who pay with their lives for the burning of those fuels."—Rolling Stone

From one of the world’s most celebrated thinkers on climate change comes a groundbreaking investigation into extreme weather • “I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It will change how you think about the most important story of our time."—JEFF GOODELL, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First

Climate change does not affect everyone equally. While many scientists focus on studying climate change as a physics problem, Friederike Otto, one of the world’s most renowned climate scientists, sees it as a symptom of the global crisis of inequality, not its cause. In this ambitious, fast-paced book, she offers concrete examples of how extreme weather events caused by climate change reveal uncomfortable truths about the failures of political and social infrastructures around the world.

Comparing eight extreme weather events—including heat waves in North America, floods in Pakistan, droughts in Madagascar, and wildfires in Australia—Otto reveals how climate change is affecting the world’s most vulnerable, whether they are women working on farms in Ghana during heat waves, or elderly people who died during floods in Germany. In particular, Otto examines the Global North’s extractionist view of the Global South, a view that ensures elites are protected while others bear the brunt of the climate disaster.

Climate Injustice shares the stories of real people, shining a light on the real damage inflicted on real lives. Above all, it shows how racism, colonialism, sexism, and climate change are interconnected, and how positive changes on one level can lead to positive effects on another. Authored by the co-founder of World Weather Attribution, a cutting-edge scientific method that pinpoints the role of climate change in extreme weather events, Climate Injustice offers a groundbreaking view on the fires, floods, heatwaves, and storms that are wreaking havoc at an alarming pace.

Inequality and injustice are at the core of what makes climate change a problem for humanity. Fairness and global justice must therefore be at the core of the solution. Climate justice concerns everyone.

Dr. Friederike Otto is a climate researcher, physicist, and doctor of philosophy. At the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, she researches extreme weather and its effects on society, and she has helped develop the new field of attribution science. She is one of a handful of scientists around the world who can calculate in real time how much climate change has impacted our weather. Her first book, Angry Weather, was published in 2020. In 2021, she was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world. She lives in London.