March 2014: Poorly regulated fracking and shale gas extraction risks harming threatened species and polluting our waterways, says some of the UK’s leading wildlife and countryside groups.
Their report, Are We Fit to Frack?, highlights a lack of regulation around shale gas exploitation which could cause serious impacts for a range of threatened species. It also raises serious concerns about risks of water contamination and concludes that the UK is at present not ‘fit to frack’.
It contains ten recommendations for making fracking safer and the groups are calling for protected wildlife areas, nature reserves and national parks to be frack-free zones, for full environmental assessments to be carried out for each proposal. They also want the shale gas industry to pay the costs of its regulation and any pollution clean-ups.
The report comes just before a public inquiry is to begin examining the application for the first commercial extraction of unconventional gas in Scotland at Airth. Whilst the proposal by Dart Energy to extract coal bed methane (another ‘unconventional gas’) does not involve fracking, it raises many of the same environmental concerns, including whether Scotland will be able to meet its climate change targets if new forms of fossil fuel extraction forge ahead.
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