Pace Law School’s Land Use Law Center and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (F&ES) are collaborating to identify the distinctly local impacts of hydraulic fracturing and how local governments can respond where they are not satisfied that federal and state regulations properly mitigate these local effects. The attached guest blog by Christopher Halfnight, F&ES ’15, reports that this joint research team is “building a suite of tools to empower local government decision-making on a range of shale-related local governance challenges. The project’s stakeholder workshops and research to date have helped fashion the first significant resource in that toolkit: a comprehensive impacts framework cataloguing the potential local effects from shale oil and gas development. The research team developed this framework of fracking impacts to help orient communities to potential risks and benefits of shale development. The framework represents a major new resource to provide both a significant knowledge base for local government decision-making and a substantive legal foundation for regulatory and non-regulatory actions.” The full blog is here: http://environment.yale.edu/envirocenter/post/cataloguing-impacts-of-the-shale-boom-a-foundation-for-local-governance/
