Summary
Friederike (Fredi) is a Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, one of Imperial's six hubs for research, innovation and influence on global challenges.
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'.
In 2018, Fredi became one of the international climate scientists writing 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 new Synthesis Report which will be published in September 2022. This summarises all the science reported by the IPCC since 2018.
Fredi is the co-lead of 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 paving the way for new sustainability litigation.
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.
Fredi is the author of the popular science book "Angry Weather" and her work has been featured extensively in global media including the FT, Economist, Times of India, the Sun, Wall Street Journal, Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Mail, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, BBC, and CNN.
Publications
Journals
Zachariah M, Kumari S, Mondal A, et al., 2023, Attribution of the 2015 drought in Marathwada, India from a multivariate perspective, Weather and Climate Extremes, Vol:39, ISSN:2212-0947, Pages:1-14
Otto F, Zachariah M, Saeed F, et al., 2023, Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan, Environmental Research: Climate, ISSN:2752-5295
Kimutai J, New M, Wolski P, et al., 2022, Attribution of the human influence on heavy rainfall associated with flooding events during the 2012, 2016, and 2018 March-April-May seasons in Kenya, Weather and Climate Extremes, Vol:38, ISSN:2212-0947
Otto F, Minnerop P, Raju E, et al., 2022, Causality and the fate of climate litigation: The role of the social superstructure narrative, Global Policy, Vol:13, ISSN:1758-5880, Pages:736-750
Li S, Otto FEL, 2022, The role of human-induced climate change in heavy rainfall events such as the one associated with Typhoon Hagibis (vol 172, pg 1, 2022), Climatic Change, Vol:172, ISSN:0165-0009