Research Agenda

Established by Andrew Jorgenson in the summer of 2023, and with funding from The University of British Columbia and The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Climate & Society Lab (CSL) serves as an incubator for research on the societal causes, consequences, and solutions to the climate crisis. Lab members, with collaborators at UBC and at other institutions throughout the world, study the anthropogenic drivers of carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, and the population health impacts of emissions and ground-level air pollution resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

A key emphasis of CSL’s research is how economic growth, income distributions, militarization, and the structure of global production and trade networks shape growth in emissions, and how these factors contribute to the unequal distribution of climate-related impacts on population health and well-being. A related emphasis is how the organization of civil society, governance, and policy can reduce carbon emissions and air pollution resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. The majority of CSL research involves the use of statistical modeling techniques to analyze data at multiple scales (e.g., nation-states, provinces, power plants) and through time.