Andrew Jorgenson is a Professor and Founding Director of the Climate & Society Lab at the University of British Columbia. As an environmental macrosociologist trained in global political economy, he conducts research on the human dimensions of global and regional environmental change, with a 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.

A key emphasis of Andrew’s research is how economic growth, forms of inequality, militarization, and the 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 directly reduce carbon emissions and air pollution, and also mitigate the carbon polluting impacts of growth, inequality, militarization, and world-economic factors more broadly. While Andrew embraces methodological pluralism, the majority of his 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, states, cities), and facilities (e.g., power plants).

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, Nature Communications, 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 five years)

(underlined coauthors were students at the time of publication)

Grant, Don, Tyler Hansen, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer. 2024. “A Worldwide Analysis of Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets’ Impact on Power Plants’ CO₂ Emissions.” Nature Communications 15:7517.

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.

Jorgenson, Andrew, Terrence Hill, Brett Clark, Ryan Thombs, Peter Ore, Kelly Balistreri, and Jennifer Givens. 2020. “Power, Proximity, and Physiology: Does Income Inequality and Racial Composition Amplify the Impacts of Air Pollution on Life Expectancy in the United States?” Environmental Research Letters 15:024013.

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

Prospective Graduate Students: please feel free to contact Andrew, especially if your research interests are aligned with his. Their former PhD students have secured postdocs, tenure-track faculty positions, and applied research positions at various institutions and organizations throughout the world, including Boston University, Drexel University, New Mexico State University, Oklahoma State University, Pennsylvania State University, Singapore Management University, Southern Illinois University, United States Census Bureau, University College Dublin, Utah State University, and Washington State University.