Research Agenda

Established by Andrew Jorgenson in the summer of 2023, and with support from UBC, 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. “Anthropogenic” drivers, a more technical term for societal causes, refer to the human actions that cause climate change and the societal factors that shape and condition those actions.

A key emphasis of much of CSL’s research is how forms of power and structural inequalities, along with other political-economic and socio-demographic characteristics, shape growth in emissions, and how these factors contribute to the unequal distribution of climate-related impacts on health and well-being. A related emphasis is how elements of civil society as well as climate, decarbonization, and energy policies and agreements can directly reduce emissions and air pollution, and also mitigate the carbon polluting impacts of inequality, power, and economic development more broadly. 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 sub-fields, including geography, political science, and ecological economics. As important, CSL is committed to propelling a stronger presence of sociology in interdisciplinary climate change research and policy.