I am a Professor and Founding Director of the Climate & Society Lab at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I am also a Faculty Associate at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, a Faculty Affiliate of both the Climate Solutions Collective and the Centre for Climate Justice at UBC, and a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Economics at Vilnius University. Trained in comparative and global political economy, I conduct research on the human dimensions of global and regional environmental change, with a focus on the societal causes and consequences of the climate crisis. I also have longstanding interests in the political economy of development, inequality, and population health. The majority of my research involves the use of statistical modeling techniques to analyze social and environmental data at multiple scales and through time.

My published research has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Pacific Sociological Association, and the British Sociological Association, and I am a recipient of the Fred Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology. My work appears in various disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Nature Climate Change, Environmental Research Letters, Sustainability Science, Sociological Science, Nature Communications, WIREs Climate Change, Sociological Theory, Ecological Economics, Social Science Research, Energy Policy, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Global Environmental Politics, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Rural Sociology, Environmental Sociology, and Energy Research and Social Science. I’m a coauthor of Super Polluters: Tackling the World’s Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions, published by Columbia University Press, and I’ve coedited multiple volumes, handbooks, and journal special issues. My research and related scholarly activities have been funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the World Society Foundation in Switzerland.

Recently, I was an appointed author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and an appointed member of the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council for the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. I am a former elected chair of both the Environmental Sociology Section and the Sociology of Development Section of the American Sociological Association. I’m a founding coeditor of Sociology of Development, a journal published by University of California Press, and I serve on the editorial board for various disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals. Prior to coming to UBC, I was a Professor and Chairperson for the Department of Sociology and Professor of Environmental Studies at Boston College.

Google Scholar Profile

Representative Publications (past six years)

(underlined coauthors were students at the time of publication)

Jorgenson, Andrew, Taekyeong Goh, Nicolas Viens, and Ryan Thombs. 2026. “Reducing Inequality is Not Antithetical to Solving the Climate Crisis: An Analysis of Disposable Income Shares and Carbon Emissions for Canada’s Provinces.” Environmental Impact Assessment Review 120:108440.

Thombs, Ryan, and Andrew Jorgenson. 2026. “Does Stringent Climate Policy Decouple Economic Growth from Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” Social Forces soaf217.

Grant, Don, Andrew Jorgenson, Wesley Longhofer, and Ion Vasi. 2026. “The Long Shadow of Partisan Hostility: How Affective Polarization Hinders Democracies’ Ability to Mitigate Climate Change.” American Sociological Review 91(1):19-54.

Jorgenson, Andrew, Taekyeong Goh, Robert Clark, and Jeffrey Kentor. 2026. “Does Military Power Shape Foreign Direct Investment’s Carbon Load Displacement? An Analysis of Carbon Emissions in Global South Nations, 2000-2020.” Environmental Sociology 12(2):206-220.

Jorgenson, Andrew, Brett Clark, Ryan Thombs, Jeffrey Kentor, Taekyeong Goh, and Vincentas Giedraitis. 2026. “Militarizing the Climate Crisis: An Analysis of the Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Militarization on Nations’ Carbon Emissions, 1990-2020.” Social Problems 73(3):786-807.

Jorgenson, Andrew, Taekyeong Goh, Ryan Thombs, Yasmin Koop-Monteiro, Mark Shakespear, Grace Gletsu, and Nicolas Viens. 2025. “Inequality is Driving the Climate Crisis: A Longitudinal Analysis of Province-Level Carbon Emissions in Canada, 1997-2020.” Energy Research & Social Science 119:103845.

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.

Prospective Graduate Students: please contact me if our macro-comparative research interests are aligned. My former PhD students have secured tenure-track faculty positions, postdocs, and applied research positions at various institutions and organizations throughout the world, including Boston College, 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.