Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change

by Friederike Otto, Sarah Pybus (Translator)

Overview

“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

From one of the world’s most celebrated thinkers on climate change comes a groundbreaking investigation into the human costs of extreme weather.

Climate change concerns everyone, but it does not affect us all equally. In this gripping, provocative manifesto, climate scientist Friederike Otto makes the case that the world’s most vulnerable populations are the most at risk of being impacted by climate change—though they did the least to cause it.

Comparing eight extreme weather events—including heat waves in North America, floods in Pakistan, droughts in Madagascar, and wildfires in Australia—Otto shows how global inequality is exacerbating the effects of climate change and exposes uncomfortable truths about the failures of political and social infrastructures around the world. 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 climate disasters.

An engrossing, deeply moving book, Climate Injustice shares the stories of real people, shining a light on the real damage extreme weather events inflict on real lives. Importantly, 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—as well as an essential change in perspective for how we might finally solve this crisis together.

Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781778401633
Publisher:	Greystone Books
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	751 KB

About the Author

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.

Sarah Pybus has been translating from German for almost twenty years. Her career in literary translation began when she was awarded first prize in the inaugural Nonfiction Translation Competition (German Book Office New York/Geisteswissenschaften International) in 2015. Since then, she has translated crime fiction, non-fiction and photography books, as well as working for universities, tourism companies, media outlets and many others. She translated Friederike Otto's first book, Angry Weather (Greystone Books, 2020), and her translation of Chemistry for Breakfast by Dr Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim (Greystone Books, 2021) was nominated for the 2022 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the Young Adult Science Book category.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Inequality in the Spotlight

Part I—Heat: How Climate Change Is Killing the Disadvantaged Across the World
Chapter 2: A Continent off the Charts (Canada and the U.S.)
Chapter 3: An African Phantom? (Gambia)

Part II—Drought: How Colonialism and Racism Are Hiding Themselves Behind Climate Change
Chapter 4: When Justice Dries Up (South Africa)
Chapter 5: Poverty: The Root of the Crisis (Madagascar)

Part III—Fire: How Climate Litigation Is Pushing Back Against Disinformation
Chapter 6: The End of the Rainforest (Brazil)
Chapter 7: From Pawn to Game Changer (Australia)

Part IV—Flood: How Local Attitudes and Global Politics Are Saving and Destroying Livelihoods
Chapter 8: Guilt and Responsibility (Germany)
Chapter 9: A Country Drowning in Climate Damage (Pakistan)
Chapter 10: What Now?

Acknowledgments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

"Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change, newly translated into English by Sarah Pybus, melds big-picture thinking on climate inequality with detailed but accessible accounts of climate science."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Climate Injustice burns with outrage ... One of Otto’s great virtues as a writer is that she’s a highly-respected scientist who is willing to go beyond data and numbers into the realms of politics and policy."
—Rolling Stone

"Searing in her clarity, unassailable in her logic, and bolstered by graphic examples from around the world, Fredi Otto demonstrates, irrefutably, how the North's fossil-fuel-powered “extractivist” economic model drives global climate disruption at the expense of the living world in general, and social justice in particular, endangering us all. Climate Injustice prosecutes the case; all it needs now is a courtroom, preferably in The Hague."
—John Vaillant, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

"Friederike Otto is a pioneer in the exciting field of climate attribution science. In Climate Injustice, Otto combines hard-hitting data analysis with deep sensitivity to local experiences around the world to show that climate action must grapple with the enormity of global inequality to have any chance of success. This is an essential, beautiful book—a clarion call for environmental justice."
—Sunil Amrith, author of The Burning Earth

"Dr. Friederike Otto goes beyond explaining a multitude of extreme weather events: unpacking the cruel global injustice of who is paying the steepest cost. The language and framing pull no punches."
—Seth Klein, climate campaigner and author of A Good War

"In her day job, [Friederike] Otto reveals how climate change causes disasters and stops those responsible from hiding. In this masterful book, she flips the script to expose the root causes of climate change and forces us to stop hiding from confronting them."
—Akshat Rathi, author of Climate Capitalism

"Friederike Otto is not just a great scientist, but a great scientist who sees beyond science. Climate Injustice is a passionate, fantastically readable argument that the climate crisis is not about saving the planet. It is about saving human dignity and rights. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It will change how you think about the most important story of our time."
—Jeff Goodell, author of The New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First

"We call it global warming, but as Friederike Otto's evocative and provocative volume makes clear, 'the globe' is not some undifferentiated mass. Climate change invariably comes first and worst for those that did the least to cause it—and only by understanding and dealing with this truth can we make the progress we must."
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Friederike Otto is one of the most important scientists at work on climate change today. Her pioneering attribution studies don't just help us to understand climate disasters better, they give us a powerful tool for doing climate justice. As Climate Injustice explains, the climate crisis is not a scientific problem with technical solutions, but a justice problem that reflects and reinforces unequal power relationships. Combining a climatologist's insights with voices from the margins, Otto's writing glows with scientific curiosity, anger and compassion.”
—Jeremy Williams, author of Climate Change Is Racist

From the Publisher