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It’s the question that so many of us ask each time an extreme weather event strikes: is climate change to blame? Politicians and journalists are quick to jump to conclusions, leading to uninformed arguments and headlines before scientists have had a chance to present the facts.
As co-founder of World Weather Attribution, Dr Friederike Otto has been instrumental in linking natural disasters to human-made global warming for more than a decade, and was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2021.
Working with scientists around the world, her team uses weather observations and computer modelling to quantify how climate change influenced the intensity and likelihood of an extreme weather event in the immediate aftermath. Her work also highlights how global inequality is both driving climate change and being made worse by it, encouraging actions to make communities and countries more resilient and prevent future disasters.
It was just seven days into the start of this year when one of the most devastating wildfires in modern US history struck, with hurricane-force winds sending flames ripping through California and claiming the lives of 28 people and displacing thousands.
Three weeks later, World Weather Attribution concluded that human-induced global warming made the fires around 6% more intense and 35% more probable.“There are increasingly few extreme weather events where climate change did not play a role,” Otto explains.
“The biggest change we see globally is extreme heat, but we are also witnessing heavy rainfall, with the floods in Valencia last year, for example. Countries are experiencing weather events that they have never seen before, so even if there are early warnings, people just don’t know what to do because they are not aware the weather can be so deadly.”
That’s not to say that all natural disasters are caused or made worse by climate change. Take, for example, the 2019-21 drought in Madagascar, which saw hundreds of thousands of people suffer from food insecurity and famine.
“It was labelled as the first climate change-induced famine, but that’s just wrong, because it wasn’t climate change that caused the famine,” says Otto, who also works as a senior lecturer at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.
“It might have made the drought a bit worse, but, even if the drought hadn’t been quite as bad, the impact would have been devastating because of the high vulnerability.”
An ailing social and infrastructure system, poor local decision-making and planning, and a lack of mobility for people in Madagascar were more to blame for the devastation brought by the drought.
Ignoring these structural failures allows the status quo to continue, Otto argues, weakening the weakest even further and creating a politically convenient narrative. “As well as cutting emissions, we have to be much more conscious of how we actually increase livelihood options and resilience for people in a sustainable way,” she says.
Otto says that Madagascar is a clear example of how closely adaptation is connected to justice, explaining how vulnerability often determines whether or not an extreme weather event develops into a disaster.
“Every time we do an attribution study, we look at who is affected by these events and why. In every single study, we find these events are affecting those who are already most vulnerable, increasing the gap between those who are less vulnerable, which really brought home to me how inequality and climate change are linked.”
In her latest book, Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change, published this month, Otto outlines how “the legacy of colonialism permeates everything”.
Although climate change would still have existed if Europe hadn’t conquered any colonies and humans had still burned fossil fuels, Otto argues that “climate change would have looked very different without the West’s ongoing colonial mindset”.
“You would not have this big Global South, Global North divide in how the benefits of burning fossil fuels were distributed in the beginning,” she tells me. “The very unequal distribution of costs and benefits that we see today would not be so without that colonial heritage.”
Both developing and developed countries continue to argue that, for reasons of fairness, the Global South must initially have very high greenhouse gas emissions to grow their economies – ignoring the fact that the poor will pay for the lifestyles of a small number of wealthy people.
Otto refers to this as the “colonial fossil narrative”, explaining how the rich and powerful fossil fuel industry shapes our global perception of what constitutes a desirable life. “There is this very strong narrative that burning fossil fuels increases our standard of living and makes lives better, which, of course, is not the case – it is access to cheap energy that does that.
“At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it made life a lot worse for most people that were working in factories, but that’s not the story we are telling. We are telling the story that burning fossil fuels makes your life better, and that it’s unfair not to do so, which is a really difficult narrative to address.”
Otto describes her new book as being about “climate change and poverty, sexism, racism, arrogance, ignorance and power”. It comes at a time when US president Donald Trump’s “America first” mantra is seemingly resonating with voters, and when advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion are increasingly under attack.
Many looking to advance the environmental and sustainability agenda are fearful that linking issues of race and sexism will turn people away from green policies. “But that’s what the right-wing politicians really want us to believe,” Otto counters.
“Now it is more important than ever for those of us who don’t want to live in a world where Trump and his cohort set our narratives to push back, and not be afraid to talk about something just because Trump might not like it. We’ve seen political parties doing that, and it’s not working.”
I speak to Otto just days before elections in her native Germany, where the far-right AfD surged in the polls to secure 20.8% of the votes, finishing second to the conservatives; doubling its support in just four years.
“None of the progressive parties really provide a vision of what the world should look like, whereas, of course, the conservative parties and right-wing parties all want to go back to this society that never really existed, where everyone was burning as much oil and coal as possible, and everyone was happy.
“Even the parties on the left have moved very much to the right, and have completely changed their narrative on migration – the only thing that does is provide more support for Trump, where we live in a world where we can’t talk about racism and tackling inequality.”
The subject of inequality was brought into sharp focus at last year’s COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, a petrostate where the £300bn in climate finance from developed countries agreed for developing ones by 2035 fell far short of the $1.3trn that economists say is needed.
“I was not surprised, because the last two COPs have both been hosted by countries with a very vested interest to not have strong deals,” Otto says. “The next conference in Brazil should be a much better platform for these discussions since it has a government that is at least aware of the importance of combating climate change, the welfare of citizens, and resilience.”
Ultimately, Otto says that the ambition of these conferences has always been about protecting human lives and countless livelihoods.
As her book explains: “Climate change does one thing above all else: it curtails fundamental rights. The right to life and freedom, the right to free movement, the right to property, to social security, to welfare, and not least the freedom of cultural life. These are all universally recognised human rights. The Paris Agreement is a human rights treaty, not a treaty on the protection of polar bears or on charity for the Global South.”
Describing extreme weather as a singular moment that tells us something about climate change, and nothing more, conceals the inequality that has just as much of an impact on the weather’s effects, she says.
“I think it’s important to not just talk about climate change, because vulnerability plays a huge role as well, and what we usually see is the reporting focused on either/or, which is really not helpful because we need to address both.
“In science there is slowly a change where you have fewer people working in silos and there is much more crossover between natural sciences and social scientists, but that takes time to penetrate through.”
However, she reiterates how we must break free from the colonial fossil narrative if we are to successfully address global inequality and escape from the perils of exponential extraction and consumption
“All our heroes in movies and so on are driving into the sunset in cars on big roads, and it’s so ingrained in all the images and symbolism that we have, so there’s a big task for all of us to find other heroes, and that’s a job for artists, for writers, for scientists, and also policymakers.
“We will not change this by just acting on a consumer basis or from a place of guilt.” She continues: “When you look at indices such as the Human Development Index and World Happiness Report, they always show that people are happiest in places where inequality is low, because it allows you to do the things that humans need to thrive.
“I hope people will think about how they can help change our underlying social structures and create heroes that live in a world that is not totally beholden to the colonial fossil narrative.”
Climate Injustice is available to pre-order at www.bit.ly/Climate-Injustice-Greystone
Chris Seekings is the Deputy Editor of IEMA’s Transform magazine, which is published biomonthly for IEMA members. Chris’s role involves writing sustainability-related news, features and interviews, as well as helping to plan and manage the magazine’s other day-to-day activities.
