Concern has been raised in the scientific literature about the environmental implications of extracting natural gas from deep shale formations, and published studies suggest that shale gas ...development may affect local groundwater quality. The potential for surface water quality degradation has been discussed in prior work, although no empirical analysis of this issue has been published. The potential for large-scale surface water quality degradation has affected regulatory approaches to shale gas development in some US states, despite the dearth of evidence. This paper conducts a large-scale examination of the extent to which shale gas development activities affect surface water quality. Focusing on the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, we estimate the effect of shale gas wells and the release of treated shale gas waste by permitted treatment facilities on observed downstream concentrations of chloride (Cl ⁻) and total suspended solids (TSS), controlling for other factors. Results suggest that (i) the treatment of shale gas waste by treatment plants in a watershed raises downstream Cl ⁻ concentrations but not TSS concentrations, and (ii) the presence of shale gas wells in a watershed raises downstream TSS concentrations but not Cl ⁻ concentrations. These results can inform future voluntary measures taken by shale gas operators and policy approaches taken by regulators to protect surface water quality as the scale of this economically important activity increases.
Functional abdominal pain disorders (FAPDs) are one of the most common gastrointestinal disorders in children. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of FAPDs in children in southern ...Anhui Province, China and their association with academic stress.
In this cross-sectional survey, we randomly selected children aged 6-17 years from 11 public schools in southern Anhui Province. FAPDs were diagnosed according to the Rome IV criteria, and a custom-designed questionnaire was used to investigate the association between academic stress and FAPDs in children.
A total of 2,344 children aged 6-17 years were enrolled. The mean age was 12.4 ± 3.0 years. Of these children, 335 (14.3%) were diagnosed with FAPDs according to the Rome IV criteria. Among the children with FAPDs, 156 (46.6%) were boys, and 179 (53.4%) were girls. The prevalence was higher in girls than in boys. The most common disorder was irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) (n = 182 (7.8%)). Other types of FAPDs included functional abdominal pain-not otherwise specified (FAPNOS) (n = 70 (3.0%)), functional dyspepsia (FD) (n = 55 (2.3%)), and abdominal migraine (AM) (n = 28 (1.2%)). Academic stress, not meeting parental expectations, poor relationships with parents, and sleep disturbances were independent risk factors for FAPDs in children; academic performance was not associated with the development of FAPDs.
There was a high prevalence of FAPDs among children in southern Anhui Province, China, and IBS was the most common subtype of functional abdominal pain. Academic stress, rather than academic performance, was associated with FAPDs in children.
Changing environmental conditions are driving worsening flood events, with consequences for counties, cities, towns, and local communities. To understand individual flood risk within this changing ...climate, local community resiliency and infrastructure impacts must also be considered. Past research has attempted to capture this but has faced several limitations. This study provides a nation-wide model of community flooding impacts within the United States currently and in 30 years through the use of high-resolution input data (parcel-level), multi-source flood hazard information (four major flood types), multi-return period hazard information (six return periods), operational threshold integration, and future-facing projections. Impacts are quantified here as the level of flooding relative to operational thresholds. This study finds that over the next 30 years, millions of additional properties will be impacted, as aspects of risk are expected to increase for residential properties by 10%, roads by 3%, commercial properties by 7%, critical infrastructure facilities by 6%, and social infrastructure facilities by 9%. Additionally, certain counties and cities persistently display impact patterns. A high-resolution model capturing aspects of flood risk as related to community infrastructure is important for an understanding of overall community risk.
Hurricanes and flood-related events cause more direct economic damage than any other type of natural disaster. In the United States, that damage totals more than USD 1 trillion in damages since 1980. ...On average, direct flood losses have risen from USD 4 billion annually in the 1980s to roughly USD 17 billion annually from 2010 to 2018. Despite flooding’s tremendous economic impact on US properties and communities, current estimates of expected damages are lacking due to the fact that flood risk in many parts of the US is unidentified, underestimated, or available models associated with high quality assessment tools are proprietary. This study introduces an economic-focused Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) approach that builds upon an our existing understanding of prior assessment methods by taking advantage of a newly available, climate adjusted, parcel-level flood risk assessment model (First Street Foundation, 2020a and 2020b) in order to quantify property level economic impacts today, and into the climate adjusted future, using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and NASA’s Global Climate Model ensemble (CMIP5). This approach represents a first of its kind—a publicly available high precision flood risk assessment tool at the property level developed completely with open data sources and open methods. The economic impact assessment presented here has been carried out using residential buildings in New Jersey as a testbed; however, the environmental assessment tool on which it is based is a national scale property level flood assessment model at a 3 m resolution. As evidence of the reliability of the EIA tool, the 2020 estimated economic impact (USD 5481 annual expectation) was compared to actual average per claim-year NFIP payouts from flooding and found an average of USD 5540 over the life of the program (difference of less than USD 100). Additionally, the tool finds a 41.4% increase in average economic flood damage through the year 2050 when environmental change is included in the model.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has implemented a large-scale multi-year infrastructure program called the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) to improve air ...transportation efficiency. To assess its efficacy, we estimate how NextGen projects completed between 2014 and 2017 affected air travel time and delays using an event study approach. We find sizable time savings in air travel time and delays from implementing NextGen. The time savings are more substantial for flights that experience unexpected shocks, such as poor weather and prior delays. In contrast, while NextGen seemed to close the performance gap between the hub and non-hub carriers generated by market power, the effect was short-lived and quickly reversed. Although we also find some small social benefits from carbon emission reductions, we cannot rule out that aggregate carbon emissions may have increased due to a rebound effect.
•Does air transportation infrastructure investment improve air travel performance?•Our event-study results suggest sizable time savings in air travel time and delays.•Our results imply large private gains from passenger time savings and fuel savings.•The benefits are greater for flights suffering from severe weather and prior delays.•Non-hub and low-cost carriers had greater gains initially, but they were short-lived.
This study reports a new and significantly enhanced analysis of US flood hazard at 30 m spatial resolution. Specific improvements include updated hydrography data, new methods to determine channel ...depth, more rigorous flood frequency analysis, output downscaling to property tract level, and inclusion of the impact of local interventions in the flooding system. For the first time, we consider pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flood hazards within the same framework and provide projections for both current (rather than historic average) conditions and for future time periods centered on 2035 and 2050 under the RCP4.5 emissions pathway. Validation against high‐quality local models and the entire catalog of FEMA 1% annual probability flood maps yielded Critical Success Index values in the range 0.69–0.82. Significant improvements over a previous pluvial/fluvial model version are shown for high‐frequency events and coastal zones, along with minor improvements in areas where model performance was already good. The result is the first comprehensive and consistent national‐scale analysis of flood hazard for the conterminous US for both current and future conditions. Even though we consider a stabilization emissions scenario and a near‐future time horizon, we project clear patterns of changing flood hazard (3σ changes in 100 years inundated area of −3.8 to +16% at 1° scale), that are significant when considered as a proportion of the land area where human use is possible or in terms of the currently protected land area where the standard of flood defense protection may become compromised by this time.
Plain Language Summary
We develop a method to estimate past, present, and future flood risk for all properties in the conterminous United States whether affected by river, coastal or rainfall flooding. The analysis accounts for variability within environmental factors including changes in sea level rise, hurricane intensity and landfall locations, precipitation patterns, and river discharge. We show that even for a conservative climate change trajectory we can expect locally significant changes in the land area at risk from floods by 2050, and by this time defenses protecting 2,200 km2 of land may be compromised. The complete dataset has been made available via a website (https://floodfactor.com/) created by the First Street Foundation in order to increase public awareness of the threat posed by flooding to safety and livelihoods.
Key Points
First complete high‐resolution flood hazard analysis of conterminous US flood risk from all major sources (fluvial, pluvial, and coastal)
In validation tests the model achieved Critical Success Index scores of 0.69–0.82, similar to many local custom‐built 2D models
By 2050, flood hazard increases for the Eastern seaboard and Western states, but decreases or changes little for the center and South‐West
A heavy truck imposes an externality if its presence causes traffic accidents for which it is not held liable. We estimate the increase in accidents that occur when a truck is added to a road using ...quasi-experimental variation in truck routes of connecting shale gas wells in Pennsylvania. We find evidence that adding a truck to a road is relatively safe for the truck itself, but less so for other cars on the road: an additional truck leads to an increase in the number of car-only accidents. However, these additional accidents are not more severe. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that the accident externality of trucking reverberates to even more road users through higher car insurance premiums.
•We study the impact of heavy trucks on traffic accidents and insurance premiums.•We isolate the impact of a heavy truck using truck routes used in shale gas development in Pennsylvania.•We find that just the presence of a heavy truck leads to more car accidents.•Trucking externalities are borne by all drivers: more trucks also lead to higher car insurance premiums.
This study has analyzed TRIPLEX1.0 by applying the model to the subtropical forest regions in Zhejiang Province, southeastern China. The main objective was to test the process-based hybrid model ...TRIPLEX1.0 in simulating density, tree height (H), diameter at breast height (DBH), litter pool and biomass using forest growth and yield data collected from three forest types: subtropical evergreen broad-leaved, coniferous broad-leaved mixed and warm temperate pine (
Pinus massoniana Lamb.) forests. The results show that simulated density, H, DBH, litter pool, aboveground and total biomass are consistent with observed data collected through Zhejiang Province, suggesting that the TRIPLEX1.0 model is capable in simulating forest growth and biomass dynamics of subtropical forest ecosystems. The coefficient of determination (
r
2) between simulated values and yield measurements show a 0.91 variability for density, 0.86 for DBH, 0.83 for H, 0.89 for aboveground biomass and 0.91 for total biomass (except for litter pool that showed a 0.54 variability). The independent validations obtained by utilizing TRIPLEX1.0 demonstrate that the model offers competency while providing confidence when applying its ability to extrapolate outcomes at regional scales and its ability to withstand rigorous testing for simulating carbon storage in subtropical forest ecosystems.
Hydraulic fracturing of shale for gas production in Pennsylvania generates large quantities of wastewater, the composition of which has been inadequately characterized. We compiled a unique data set ...from state-required wastewater generator reports filed in 2009–2011. The resulting data set, comprising 160 samples of flowback, produced water, and drilling wastes, analyzed for 84 different chemicals, is the most comprehensive available to date for Marcellus Shale wastewater. We analyzed the data set using the Kaplan–Meier method to deal with the high prevalence of nondetects for some analytes, and compared wastewater characteristics with permitted effluent limits and ambient monitoring limits and capacity. Major-ion concentrations suggested that most wastewater samples originated from dilution of brines, although some of our samples were more concentrated than any Marcellus brines previously reported. One problematic aspect of this wastewater was the very high concentrations of soluble constituents such as chloride, which are poorly removed by wastewater treatment plants; the vast majority of samples exceeded relevant water quality thresholds, generally by 2–3 orders of magnitude. We also examine the capacity of regional regulatory monitoring to assess and control these risks.
Shale gas pipeline development can have negative environmental impacts, including adverse effects on species and ecosystems through habitat degradation and loss. From a societal perspective, pipeline ...development planning processes should account for such externalities. We develop a multiobjective binary integer-programming model, called the Multi Objective Pipeline Siting (MOPS) model, to incorporate habitat externalities into pipeline development and to estimate the trade-offs between pipeline development costs and habitat impacts. We demonstrate the utility of the model using an application from Bradford and Susquehanna counties in northeastern Pennsylvania. We find that significant habitat impacts can be avoided for relatively low cost, but the avoidance of the additional habitat impacts becomes gradually and increasingly costly. For example, 10% of the habitat impacts can be avoided at less than a two percent pipeline cost increase relative to a configuration that ignores habitat impacts. MOPS or a similar model could be integrated into the pipeline siting and permitting process so oil and gas companies, communities, and states can identify cost-effective options for habitat conservation near shale gas development.
PDF
