Dr Friederike Otto leaves ECI after meteoric decade in climate research

After ten years at the University of Oxford, Dr Friederike Otto, Associate Director of ECI, is leaving the University to take up the position of Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute of Climate Change and the Environment.

Fredi joined the University in 2011 as a postdoctoral researcher on the climateprediction.net project. Alongside her colleague Geert Jan van Oldenborgh at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and following initial discussions with Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science, she founded the World Weather Attribution initiative (WWA) in 2014 to answer an urgent question in climate research: to what extent is human activity responsible for extreme weather events?

The team sought to answer this question as close to the event - e.g. a drought, fire or hurricane - as possible, to inform opinions while the weather event was still in the news cycle. WWA's findings have been conclusive: extreme weather events from heat waves in the Pacific North West to devastating rains in Kenya have been made more likely, and more damaging, due to human caused climate change.

Their strategy of rapid publication paid off: thousands of media organisations across the world have reported on the findings. Some now include a line affirming climate change's role in extreme weather events as standard in their reporting. In September 2021, Time magazine recognised Fredi and Geert Jan on their list of the world's 100 most influential people.

"I've great admiration for the way in which Fredi took up a new, risky line of inquiry and built up a collaboration that was strong enough to establish credibility with scientists, journalists and the public - all done under unusual time pressure and exposed to a lot of publicity," said Sarah Darby, Associate Professor and Acting Deputy Leader of ECI Energy Programme. "She took the discipline into new territory and gave it a relevance to people's lives that wasn't there before."

"Fredi and her collaborators have transformed the conversation around climate change, by providing a firm connection between experienced weather and global climate change that was previously not possible, and developing the speedy science response that brought an immediacy not feasible through the standard pace of academic publication. This has utterly changed the tone of the debate around the urgency of tackling climate change," added Yadvinder Malhi, Professor of Ecosystem Science.

"Over the past decade, Fredi has made very important contributions to the science of event attribution, particularly on the all-important interface between hazard and vulnerability. As a lead author of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, she has brought extreme event attribution to the heart of both the Working Group 1 and Synthesis Reports, as well as the World Climate Research Programme's Grand Challenge on Weather and Climate Extremes," notes Myles Allen.

Michael Obersteiner, Director of ECI, concluded: "Fredi and her team have shaped the narrative on climate change for decades to come. And now that WWA research is being presented in courtrooms, it's impact will only continue to increase. We are proud that Fredi chose ECI as her home for the last decade, and look forward to collaborating with her as she continues her remarkable journey in climate research."