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

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

"Searing in her clarity … 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. Climate Injustice prosecutes the case; all it needs now is a courtroom, preferably in The Hague."—JOHN VAILLANT, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

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.