Rebecca Elliott

Rebecca Elliott is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), specializing in climate change, risk governance, and flood insurance. She is a Research Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the LSE Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Her work explores how climate change reshapes social and environmental landscapes, particularly through the lens of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). She co-convenes the Social Life of Climate Change seminar series and serves as an Editor of the British Journal of Sociology.

Educated at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD 2016), her research focuses on the moral and political dimensions of climate adaptation, including property value dynamics under climate change and regional inequality linked to decarbonization. Her book Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States (2021) received major awards, including the Viviana Zelizer Book Award and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology (2023).

Her current projects address property valuation in climate-changed regions, decarbonization's regional impacts in the UK, and cultural commemoration's role in climate responses. She teaches on the MSc Economy and Society program and a course on the Sociology of Consumption.

Awardees include the Leverhulme Trust, UK ESRC, and ACLS/Mellon Foundation. She advises on climate policy, emphasizing equitable risk-sharing and adaptive governance. Her work bridges sociology with interdisciplinary climate research, highlighting societal responses to environmental challenges.