WHIMBY (What’s Happening in My Backyard?): A Community Risk-Benefit Matrix of Unconventional Oil and Gas Development

RFF experts and collaborators are working to help answer questions about the community impacts of unconventional oil and gas development and better understand the benefits and costs to local communities, as well as which regulatory, voluntary, and market actions can maximize benefits while reducing costs. As part of this effort, the Community Risk-Benefit Matrix identifies specific areas of concern related to impacts addressed by the team’s literature review (left column), as well as impacts for which RFF experts have conducted original research and analysis (see Further Reading below each section of the matrix).

The matrix indicates the quality of the literature for each impact, judged subjectively with the color indicating whether we find the studies analyzing an impact to be, on average, of a certain quality. Impacts may be assessed by multiple low-quality studies and a medium-quality study, for example, and we would consider this body of literature to be low quality. A high-quality classification indicates that we trust the results of such studies, including the accuracy, magnitude, and direction of the results—meaning, in a practical sense, that it has no serious or fatal flaws (such as inadequate methodologies) that would lead us to question the results. A study is considered low quality if we believe we cannot trust the results because the study has multiple, serious flaws (e.g., methodology, data, focus, or study design are inadequate to reliably estimate outcomes). A study is considered medium quality if it does not fit in the other two categories. A study is considered medium quality if it is not of high or low quality. A study is therefore medium quality if it has any such major flaw or if either the methodology, data, focus, or study design leads to questionable results for a number of reasons. Generally, we find the magnitude and direction of these results to be informative, but question the precision.

Lastly, we summarize the findings reported by the literature for each impact—whether the studies as a whole report increases, decreases, or no relationship between the impact and an increase in unconventional oil and gas development. The “heterogeneous” classification indicates that the literature reports different outcomes across areas. The “inconsistent” classification indicates that the literature reports contradictory results (i.e., two studies find an increase or decrease for a certain impact in the same context).