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

About this book

From the scientist 'transforming our understanding of how human-caused global heating is affecting the planet' (The Guardian) comes a bracing investigation into extreme weather's impact on the world's most vulnerable. For readers of Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg.

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 pinpointed the role of climate change in extreme weather events for the first time, 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.

Originally published in German in 2023 by Ullstein Buchverlage as Klimaungerechtigkeit: Was die Klimakatastrophe mit Kapitalismus, Rassismus und Sexismus zu tun hat.

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

Customer Reviews

Biography

Dr Friederike Otto is a climate researcher, physicist, and doctor of philosophy. At the Grantham Institute for Climate Change 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.