environmental impact assessment, interaction of population, technology, and affluence on the environment,
tradeoffs between economic growth and environmental protection, mobilization and networking of environmental
movements, unequal social and economic consequences of environmental policies in local communities, and
environmental implications of economic and political arrangements that characterize international relations and
define the relative places of peoples around the world. Despite its foundational focus on the human-natural nexus,
environmental sociologists have only recently turned their research attention to global climate change. There
is, however, a great deal that sociologists in general, and environmental sociologists specifically, have learned
that contributes to understanding the causes of global climate change, for example, which populations are most
vulnerable and resilient to the impacts of climate change, and what is the role of competition among states in the
global system to accelerating the drivers of global climate change.The 2007 IPCC report documents
increases in global atmospheric and ocean
temperatures, predicts associated rises in
sea level, and concludes that the warming
of the global climate is both unequivocal
and anthropogenic.^8 Sociologists who
study global climate change have devoted
considerable efforts to investigating and
applying a range of conceptual approaches
to this emerging scientific consensus about
global warming. Central to these sociological
analyses is the knowledge that purely
technological “fixes,” absent consideration
of social factors, will not be sufficient to
mitigate or successfully adapt to global climate change. The research areas listed below represent some of the
major theoretical and methodological strategies used by sociologists to better understand the relationship between
humans and their natural world and to identify the ecologically-relevant features of modern industrial nations
and their impact on global climate change. Each section contains both a summary of sociological analyses of the
social causes of global climate change and promising areas for investigation and questions for future research.Political Economy: One of sociology’s most significant contributions to climate change research arises out of
attention to the intersecting political and economic orders, at both global and national levels, as contributors and
potential mitigators of global climate change. Like all social scientific approaches, political economy research
acknowledges that climate change is not merely rooted in planetary physical systems, often the main focus
of natural scientists, politicians, and the general public. Building on social theories like Allan Schnaiberg’s
“Treadmill of Production,”^9 John Bellamy Foster’s “Metabolic Rift,”^10 and Marina Fischer-Kowalski’s “Social
Metabolism,”^11 political economy analyses link carbon emissions and their effect on the global climate to(^8) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers (Cambridge University
Press, 2007), p. 2.
(^9) Allan Schnaiberg, The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity (Oxford University Press, 1980); see also Kenneth Gould, David Pellow,
Allan Schnaiberg, The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy (Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
(^10) John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of
Sociology 105, 2 (1999):366-405.
(^11) Marina Fischer-Kowalski and H. Haberl, Socioecological Transitions and Global Change. Trajectories of Social Metabolism and Land
Use (Edward Elgar, 2007).
Part I: Sociological Analyses of the Causes of
Global Climate Change