Results from a survey of life cycle assessment-aligned socioenvironmental priorities in US and Australian communities hosting oil, natural gas, coal, and solar thermal energy production

Abstract

Large energy infrastructure is often socially and environmentally disruptive, even as it provides services that people have come to depend on. Residents of areas affected by energy development often note both negative and positive impacts. This reflects the multicategory nature of socioenvironmental outcomes and emphasizes the importance of careful and community-oriented decision making about major infrastructural transitions for processes like decarbonization. Quantitative tools like life cycle assessment (LCA) seek to collect and report comprehensive impact data, but even when successful, their value for decision support is limited by a lack of mechanisms to systematically engage with values-driven tradeoffs across noncommensurable categories. Sensitivity analyses designed to help decision makers and interested parties make sense of data are common in LCA and similar tools, but values are rarely explicitly addressed. This lack of attention to values – arguably the most meaningful set of decision inputs in such tools – can lead to overreliance on single issue (e.g., climate change impact) or proxy (e.g., monetized cost) outputs that reduce the value of holistic evaluations. This research presents results from preregistered hypotheses for a survey of residents of energy-producing communities in the United States (US) and Australia, with the goal of uncovering energy transition-relevant priorities by collecting empirical, quantitative data on people’s priorities for outcomes aligned with LCA. The survey was designed to identify diverse value systems, with the goal of making it easier for users to identify and consider value conflicts, potentially highlighting needs for further data collection, system redesign, or additional engagement. Notably, results reveal remarkably consistent priority patterns across communities and subgroups, suggesting that the common LCA practice of equal prioritization might be masking decision-relevant information. Although this effort was designed specifically to support research on energy transitions, future work could easily be extended more broadly.

Toward equitable coastal community resilience: Incorporating principles of equity and justice in coastal hazard adaptation

“…Legacies of racially biased housing and land use practices led to disproportionate heat exposure in poor communities of color (Wilson, 2020). Ongoing historical experiences of systemic inequity are highly relevant for planners and policymakers in community consultation processes involved in planning and mitigation (Grubert, 2023), and greater consideration of this aspect of equity in hazard response and recovery can ensure that such disparities are addressed rather than deepened (Wilson, 2020). Distributive equity focuses on the way risks, resources, impacts, and benefits are distributed in society (Leach et al, 2018;Rawls, 2020;Wiles and Kobayashi, 2020).…”

Leveraging environmental assessment and environmental justice to deliver equitable, decarbonized built infrastructure

“…methodology has limitations regarding how it might be leveraged to support multicriteria decision-making in decarbonizing our civil infrastructure systems, such as when trying to account for community preferences [16], an important element of a just transition [17].…”

“…The sequence in which generation retirement is optimized yields different outcomes for subpopulations in comparison to targeted subgroups, such as groups who already experience disproportionate exposure burdens. Integrating preferences to enable a just transition also supports leveraging social equity objectives into infrastructure decarbonization planning [16,[22][23][24].…”