Friederike Otto

Friederike (Fredi) is Professor in Climate Science at the Centre for Environmental Policy. She leads World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international effort to analyse and communicate the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events.

Through rapid attribution studies, which provide timely scientific evidence showing the extent to which climate change influenced a given event, WWA has helped to change the global conversation around climate change, influencing adaptation strategies and climate policy more broadly.

Fredi is a physicist with a doctorate from the Free University Berlin in philosophy of science in 2011. She joined the University of Oxford in the same year and was director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford before joining Imperial in October 2021.

Her main research interest is on extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves and storms, and understanding whether and to what extent these are made more likely or intense due to climate change - known by experts as 'climate change attribution'. Her work increasingly focusses on the intersection of science, law and policy, aiming to understand how scientific evidence can best be used in legislation, litigation, and more informal governance for more resilient societies.

Fredi has been an author at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) The Scientific Basis, which was published in August 2021, she is also an author on the IPCC's final report of the sixth assessment cycle, the Synthesis Report which was published in March 2023.

In 2020 Climate Change Attribution was named one of MIT Tech Review's top ten breakthrough technologies. In 2021 Fredi was recognised for her co-founding of WWA on the TIME100 list as one of the world’s most influential individuals, according to the renowned TIME magazine and as one of the top 10 people who made a difference in science in 2021, by the journal Nature. She received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University in 2024, and from Edinburgh University in 2025.

Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences