Milt Austin W, Gagnolet Tamara D, Armsworth Paul R
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 569 Dabney Hall, 1416 Circle Drive, Knoxville, TN, 37996, U.S.A..
The Nature Conservancy, Pennsylvania Chapter, 2101 North Front Street, Building #1, Suite 200, Harrisburg, PA, 17110, U.S.A.
Conserv Biol. 2016 Dec;30(6):1151-1158. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12766. Epub 2016 Sep 26.
Growing energy demand has increased the need to manage conflicts between energy production and the environment. As an example, shale-gas extraction requires substantial surface infrastructure, which fragments habitats, erodes soils, degrades freshwater systems, and displaces rare species. Strategic planning of shale-gas infrastructure can reduce trade-offs between economic and environmental objectives, but the specific nature of these trade-offs is not known. We estimated the cost of avoiding impacts from land-use change on forests, wetlands, rare species, and streams from shale-energy development within leaseholds. We created software for optimally siting shale-gas surface infrastructure to minimize its environmental impacts at reasonable construction cost. We visually assessed sites before infrastructure optimization to test whether such inspection could be used to predict whether impacts could be avoided at the site. On average, up to 38% of aggregate environmental impacts of infrastructure could be avoided for 20% greater development costs by spatially optimizing infrastructure. However, we found trade-offs between environmental impacts and costs among sites. In visual inspections, we often distinguished between sites that could be developed to avoid impacts at relatively low cost (29%) and those that could not (20%). Reductions in a metric of aggregate environmental impact could be largely attributed to potential displacement of rare species, sedimentation, and forest fragmentation. Planners and regulators can estimate and use heterogeneous trade-offs among development sites to create industry-wide improvements in environmental performance and do so at reasonable costs by, for example, leveraging low-cost avoidance of impacts at some sites to offset others. This could require substantial effort, but the results and software we provide can facilitate the process.
不断增长的能源需求增加了管理能源生产与环境之间冲突的必要性。例如，页岩气开采需要大量地面基础设施，这会分割栖息地、侵蚀土壤、破坏淡水系统并使珍稀物种流离失所。页岩气基础设施的战略规划可以减少经济与环境目标之间的权衡，但这些权衡的具体性质尚不清楚。我们估算了在租赁土地内避免页岩能源开发导致的土地利用变化对森林、湿地、珍稀物种和溪流产生影响的成本。我们开发了软件，用于优化页岩气地面基础设施的选址，以便在合理的建设成本下将其环境影响降至最低。在进行基础设施优化之前，我们对选址进行了直观评估，以测试这种检查是否可用于预测该选址是否能够避免影响。平均而言，通过对基础设施进行空间优化，在开发成本增加20%的情况下，可避免高达38%的基础设施总体环境影响。然而，我们发现不同选址在环境影响和成本之间存在权衡。在直观评估中，我们常常能区分出那些可以以相对较低成本开发以避免影响的选址（29%）和那些无法做到的选址（20%）。总体环境影响指标的降低在很大程度上可归因于珍稀物种的潜在迁移、 sedimentation（此处原文可能有误，推测为“沉积”之意）和森林碎片化。规划者和监管者可以估算并利用不同开发选址之间的异质权衡，以在全行业范围内改善环境绩效，并通过例如利用某些选址的低成本影响避免措施来抵消其他选址的影响，从而以合理成本实现这一目标。这可能需要付出巨大努力，但我们提供的结果和软件可以促进这一过程。
