Andrew Jorgenson is a Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Climate & Society Lab at the University of British Columbia. As a macrosociologist trained in global political economy, he uses a range of quantitative methods to conduct research on the human dimensions of global and regional environmental change, with a primary focus on the societal causes and consequences of the climate crisis. He also has longstanding interests in the political economy of development, inequality, and population health disparities.

In 2020, Andrew received the Fred Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology. Recently, he was an appointed author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment of the US Global Change Research Program (published in late 2023), and an appointed member of the US National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (resigned from council after moving to Canada and joining UBC). He is currently an affiliated Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Economics at Vilnius University.

Andrew’s published research has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Pacific Sociological Association, and the British Sociological Association. His work appears in various disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Nature Climate Change, Environmental Research Letters, Social Forces, Science of the Total Environment, Social Problems, Sustainability Science, Sociological Science, WIREs Climate Change, Sociological Theory, Ecological Economics, Social Science Research, Energy Policy, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Global Environmental Politics, Rural Sociology, and Energy Research and Social Science. He is coauthor of Super Polluters: Tackling the World’s Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions, published by Columbia University Press, and he has coedited multiple volumes, handbooks, and journal special issues.

Andrew was the 2016-2017 chair of the Environmental Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, and the 2018-2019 chair of the Sociology of Development Section of the American Sociological Association. He is the founding coeditor of Sociology of Development, a journal published by University of California Press, and he serves on the editorial board for various disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals. Prior to coming to UBC in Fall of 2023, Andrew was a Professor and Chairperson for the Department of Sociology and Professor of Environmental Studies at Boston College.

Google Scholar Profile

Representative Publications (past four years)

Jorgenson, Andrew, Brett Clark, Ryan Thombs, Jeffrey Kentor, Jennifer Givens, Xiaorui Huang, Hassan El Tinay, Daniel Auerbach, and Matthew Mahutga. 2023. “Guns Versus Climate: How Militarization Amplifies the Effect of Economic Growth on Carbon Emissions.” American Sociological Review 88(3):418-453.

Jorgenson, Andrew, Rob Clark, Jeffrey Kentor, and Annika Rieger. 2022. “Networks, Stocks, and Climate Change: A New Approach to the Study of Foreign Investment and the Environment.” Energy Research & Social Science 87:102461.

Jorgenson Andrew, Ryan Thombs, Brett Clark, Jennifer Givens, Terrence Hill, Xiaorui Huang, Orla Kelly, and Jared Fitzgerald. 2021. “Inequality Amplifies the Negative Association Between Life Expectancy and Air Pollution: A Cross-National Longitudinal Study.” Science of the Total Environment 758:143705.

Grant, Don, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer. 2020. Super Polluters: Tackling the World’s Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Fisher, Dana, and Andrew Jorgenson. 2019. “Ending the Stalemate: Toward a Theory of Anthro-Shift.” Sociological Theory 37:342-362.