By Jeremy Williams
Friedericke Otto is a German climatologist who is best known for her work on climate attribution science. This is the science of assessing natural disasters and determining to what extent they have been caused by climate change.
That is explained in her previous book, Angry Weather, which hinted at how this new science could be a tool for justice. Climate Injustice follows up on that promise in more detail, describing the connections between inequality and natural disasters, and how we can create accountability for damaging the climate.
As things stand, the damage from climate change is often invisible and far away from those of us in wealthy and temperate countries. Action to reduce it is abstracted into numerical goals, while in reality, every incremental increase means more suffering.
Take the goal to keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees C. This is “a compromise between death, damage, and loss on the one side, and profits from burning fossil fuels on the other”, says Otto. “It is a political target.”
Otto: Climate change is a crisis of injustice
Targets are framed in scientific terms, which disguise the fact that they essentially accept a certain amount of damage. It’s just a matter of who and what is considered worth saving, and who isn’t. Current targets condemn large parts of the world, including small island states and large areas of the global south, to uninhabitability.
Climate change isn’t a scientific problem, Otto argues, but “a crisis of justice.”
That injustice is tied up with colonialism and racism, but these are not simple issues. Across four sections of the book on heat, drought, fire and flood, Otto investigates the interplay of local politics, power imbalances and climate change. There is always an interplay of factors in any disaster. The notorious ‘Day Zero’ crisis in South Africa, when Cape Town nearly ran out of water, is a case in point. Yes, it was a drought year within a long-term trend of changing rainfall patterns. It was also a failure of planning that local hydrologists had been warning about for years.
The same is true of the drought and subsequent famine in Madagascar, which gets a whole chapter here. (That’s more on Madagascar than I’ve seen in any climate book so far.) It’s fair to describe it as climate-related, but it can’t be understood without looking at the failures and corruption of local authorities, or the colonial legacies that have shaped them. Above all, the south of Madagascar is extremely poor, and life is fragile. Poverty is the root cause, and “blaming nature or climate change for disasters distracts from the processes that create injustice.”
This is a level of nuance that climate justice campaigners are often wary of, with the internet’s character limits and short attention spans pushing people into black and white positions. But it’s a recurring theme here. If we want “a world that deals with the climate crisis so that as few people as possible will suffer,” then we need to understand all the causes of disaster, not stopping at climate change.
Holding people accountable for climate disasters
Understanding disasters means we can protect people better. It also opens up ways to hold people accountable.
As an example, Otto singles out Jair Bolsonaro’s razing of the Amazon during his time as president of Brazil. The emissions from the destruction he encouraged were 1% of the global total, equivalent to the annual emissions of the UK. If his policies produced 1% of emissions, could he be held responsible for 1% of the damage caused by climate change during his time in office? Responsible for 1% of the deaths?
The book describes the various court cases already brought against Bolsonaro, and the sorts of international legal structures that might lead to broader accountability.
Climate Injustice is an impressively international book, well argued and readable. I doubt there are many writers with a better understanding of the relationship between climate, weather and disaster, and that makes Friedricke Otto a vital voice in the climate conversation.
First published in The Earthbound Report.
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