Washington, D.C. and Brussels — In 2015, the UK Government’s Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG) wrote a report citing the increase of national pollution emissions that would be caused by proposed shale development in Britain.

Before the report was finally published this week, Public Health England, UK’s official body for the improvement of the nation’s health and wellbeing, always concluded that “the risks to public health from exposure to emissions from shale gas extraction are low if operations are properly run and regulated.”

Now, the AQEG report warns that “Impacts on local and regional air quality have the potential to be substantially higher than the national level impacts, as extraction activities are likely to be highly clustered. Studies in the US have shown significant impacts on both local air quality and regional ozone formation, but similar studies have not yet been undertaken for the UK.“

“The apparent suppression of this important report has helped the fossil fuel industry’s plans to turn communities into sacrifice zones. This inevitable industrialisation that goes along with shale development and the need to take the cumulative impacts into account was clearly highlighted in several formal comments against fracking plans in the UK.