People and their communities, as well as animals and the environment, face many potential risks from the process of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas. Risk characterization for shale gas development may fuel mistrust because it does not now follow best risk-analytic practices, which involve representing the perspectives of the range of interested and affected parties throughout the process. The nation may be headed toward a pattern of confrontation over fracking that could undermine goals for both energy production and environmental protection. Moreover, current governmental environmental protection institutions may be unequal to the tasks of managing the risks presented by fracking. The research that has been done so far on these risks is almost entirely technologically oriented, but this project will bring together researchers from a range of environmental, health, economic, social, and decision sciences to analyze the governance challenges of shale gas development. New synergies and ideas are urgently needed in the design of governance systems that can work in an era of declining capacity in government institutions. This study will draw on research on the governance of newly emerging risks and will expose ideas from that research to critiques from practitioners and stakeholders who can bring practical experience to bear.
This National Research Council project involves two workshops that address (1) the characterization of the full variety of risks (social, environmental, and technological), and (2) the governance issues associated with those risks. This project will point the way to a risk-analytic approach aimed at more adequately informing public choices; suggest governance models that hold promise for meeting the challenges of environmental protection in an era of declining regulatory capacity; and direct attention of the energy policy community to the need to include fundamental social challenges (not just technological ones) in the development of policies and best practices. Papers and presentations from the workshops are publicly available; additionally, a report identifies the range of risk analysis and management questions worthy of future evaluation and research-based options for governance that could be applied to meet those risks.
This project organized two public workshops in 2013, one on risk issues in shale gas development and one on risk governance issues. The National Research Council appointed a committee to organize the workshops. The committee elicited risk concerns widely from a variety of interested parties and invited presentations and discussants to review existing knowledge about many of these risk and risk governance issues. Risk issues included risks from shale gas operations, risks to water resources, risks to air quality, public health risks, ecological risks, effects on climate change, risks to communities, and interactions among risks. Governance issues included the capability of governments at various levels to meet governance challenges; the potential of nontraditional regulatory approaches (e.g., industry self-governance and improved organizational safety culture); governance efforts in Canada, Europe, and at regional levels in the USA; and the potential of public and stakeholder participation in shale gas governance. The purpose of these efforts was to gather and synthesize knowledge from multiple sourcxes relevant to the various risks presented by shale gas development and to the governance of these risks in order to inform public discussions and decision making about shale gas development, its risks, and their governance and management. The workshops were webcast live and the presentations and distributed materials were archived on the Internet at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DBASSE/BECS/CurrentProjects/DBASSE_069201. A summary of the two workshops was published by National Academy Press in 2014 and is available for free for reading and download at www.nap.edu/catalog/18953/risks-and-risk-governance-in-shale-gas-development-summary-of. After the workshops, many of the presenters and discussants prepared papers covering the state of knowledge in the areas they had discussed at the workshops. A dozen of these papers were published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, in August 2014. Among the new contributions from the workshop and from these papers were a review of evidence on past experience with energy booms and their effects on local communities, a discussion best safety practices in high-reliability organizations such as the nuclear power industry and the U.S. space progtram and their implications for shale gas development, and an analysis of effects of U.S. shale gas development on climate change that considered both direct emissions from the industry and the economic effects of shale gas development on other parts of the energy system. The workshops produced and synthesized available knowledge about shale gas risks and their governance. The project's success in terms of developing new knowledge and insights is evidenced in the publication of a series of papers from the workshops in a highly regarded scholarly journal. These papers and the workshop summary stand as resources to be used in public discussions about the development and governance of shale gas resources in the United States.
