Friederike Otto

As a pioneer in the field of attribution research, Friederike Otto has revolutionized climate science. Together with her Dutch colleague Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, she founded the World Weather Attribution initiative in 2015 – and WWA succeeded for the first time in doing what research had regularly failed to do before: show how individual extreme weather events are actually linked to climate change. The physicist and philosopher has received numerous awards for her work – but has also recently been attacked by climate deniers. Otto is the lead author of the sixth IPCC Assessment Report, was head of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford until 2021 and has since conducted research at the Grantham Institute in London. She is driven by the pursuit of justice. She repeatedly points out that the most vulnerable people are paying the highest price for the consequences of the climate crisis. She says: “That’s not a society I want to live in.”