Research Agenda

Established by Andrew Jorgenson in the summer of 2023, and with funding from UBC 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 much of CSL’s research is how economic growth, forms of inequality, militarization, and the overall structure of the world-economy shape growth in carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, and how these factors contribute to the unequal distribution of climate-related impacts on population health and well-being. A related emphasis is how elements of civil society as well as climate, decarbonization, and energy policies and agreements can reduce carbon emissions and air pollution. While CSL embraces methodological pluralism, the majority of lab-related research involves the use of statistical modeling techniques to analyze datasets that combine social and environmental data at multiple scales, including nation-states, sub-national units (e.g., provinces, cities), and facilities (e.g., power plants).

CSL’s research aims to advance the sociology of climate change and help situate climate change research more centrally within the discipline. Projects also engage with research and scholarship in sister disciplines and their subfields, including geography, political science, and ecological economics. As important, CSL is committed to creating a stronger presence of sociology in interdisciplinary climate research and policy.