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Friederike Otto, one of the co-founders of World Weather Attribution, has done much to draw the explicit links between the climate crisis and extreme weather – being able to conclude with increasing certainty how much more likely a storm or a drought is under the levels of warming to which we have exposed ourselves so far. The models we previously used to predict weather are now effectively obsolete. We are in a hot new world.
But beyond the hard science of physics, examining the impact of extreme weather compels Otto to look at the real-world consequences of such events – who is affected, how badly, and why? This takes us into the terrain of socio-economics and politics, which Climate Injustice charts. Otto argues that global inequalities, from patriarchy to colonialism, ultimately cause the violence of climate change, not the weather.
Her central point is that the damage wrought by a flood or a drought or a hurricane does not fall on everyone equally, but is proportionate to the amount of resilience or vulnerability among the people who experience it. For this reason, global majority populations are much more highly exposed to risk, along with people living in poverty in western countries, and racialised minorities, including women.
Otto even prefers not to use the phrase ‘natural disasters’, instead calling such events “natural hazards”, which become realised only as disasters in the lives of people who cannot protect themselves from their impacts with political or economic privileges. Rather than confronting the injustice inherent in our political systems, she argues, our leaders are all too happy to blame Nature for the disasters which befall disadvantaged populations.
“Human vulnerability is caused by human actions,” she writes. “If you attribute disasters to Nature, you pave a subtle escape route for all those responsible for vulnerability in the first place.”
She definitely has a point. I remember something like this happening at the height of Conservative austerity in the mid-2010s. During the extensive flooding of the UK in January 2016, the then prime minister David Cameron made a rare direct reference to the threat of the climate crisis in the UK. But, of course, while pointing to the big invisible problem in the sky, he neglected to mention the substantial cuts to local authorities and flood defences that had been taken in the two years prior to the calamity.
Otto’s thesis calls to mind something like the social model of disability, which suggests that people are disabled by barriers in society, rather than being disabled by an impairment or a condition in and of itself. Clearly there is great value in thinking about the climate crisis and extreme weather in similar terms – noting that the mere existence of, say, a wildfire in Los Angeles has a wildly different impact on someone who is homeless, someone who can flee their home before it burns, and someone who can pay for private firefighting to protect their home.
While you might feel there is ultimately a limit to this way of looking at things – Otto sometimes seeming to disavow the material, physical reality of climate change, rendering it an almost postmodern abstraction in some passages – it’s thrilling to see the hard science of climatology blended with decolonialist social analysis. In her central analysis and prescription, she is entirely correct. The weather is getting worse. But the hardest rain will always fall on the people at the sharp end of injustice.
Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change by Friederike Otto. Greystone Books, 2025. ISBN: 9781778401626
