Fracking equity: A spatial justice analysis prototype

Abstract

Although current environmental justice analyses shed light on fracking and fracking’s environmental and public health policy, a comprehensive justice analysis framework is needed in order to cover the policy gap of fracking impacts on the total environment, communities, and sustainability. Based on a concise summary of the effects of fracking on the total environment, the society and economy, and land use, this brief communication designs a conception of fracking equity and its spatial justice analysis prototype. Fracking equity is much beyond the scope of current environmental justice or social justice that is spatially limited within certain distance to fracking wells. Fracking equity based on the benefit and harm associated with fracking, not only encompasses environmental justice, social justice, but also emphasizes all stakeholder groups, the spatiotemporal characteristics of the justice of fracking, sustainable development, and the integrated analyzing methods including GIS, decision making, demographic analysis, spatiotemporal modeling at different scales, and long term analysis of fracking equity. Spatial justice of fracking unites the environmental, social, economic, ecological factors and their processes that are temporally changing and reshaping the space people live in and depend on, and these complicated factors and their dynamic interactions are the core of spatial justice.