Friederike Otto

Guest 25/26

Friederike (Fredi) Otto is Professor of Climate Science at the Centre for Environmental Policy and leads World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international initiative that analyzes the influence of climate change on extreme weather events through rapid attribution studies. The physicist received her PhD in philosophy of science from Freie Universität Berlin in 2011 and moved to Oxford that same year, where she headed the Environmental Change Institute before joining Imperial College in October 2021. Her research focuses on the attribution of extreme weather events and the interface between science, law, and policy with regard to climate resilience. She is an author of the IPCC AR6 reports (2021, 2023) and co-founder of WWA, which earned her recognition in the TIME100 (2021) and Nature's Top 10 (2021). Climate Change Attribution was named a breakthrough technology by MIT Tech Review in 2020. She has received honorary doctorates from Concordia (2024) and Edinburgh (2025). Fredi is the author of Angry Weather and Climate InJustice, and her work appears regularly in major global media outlets such as the FT, Guardian, NYT, BBC, and CNN.