The rapidly developing field of extreme event attribution allows us to quantify the influence of climate change on our weather and other climate-related events, and has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the impacts of climate change. We can now separate climate impacts which are simply ‘hard luck’, from those in which climate change have played a significant role.

Dr Friederike Otto will introduce the science of extreme event attribution, followed by Sophie Marjanac who will discuss the potential implications of these scientific advances for climate litigation. Is it now possible to successfully sue those who have contributed most to climate change for its impacts?

Dr Friederike Otto is the Deputy Director of the Environmental Change Institute, at the University of Oxford, a senior researcher in the ECI Global Climate Science Programme and leads the distributed computing climate modelling project climateprediction.net.

Sophie Marjanac is a lawyer on ClientEarth’s Climate Litigation team, specialising in Company and Financial / Climate Damage.