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

“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

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.