Empowering Landholders to Monitor Groundwater in Areas Adjacent to Mining or Gas Developments
There are two sub-projects: CSG Net & CSG Online.
CSG Net is a community based monitoring program where landholders in CSG areas are engaged in groups, provided with information on the CSG industry and groundwater systems and encouraged to measure groundwater levels in their private water wells on a monthly basis.
At regular intervals landholders forward the data to the department for storage within the department’s groundwater database. Outcomes from the landholder monitoring, and monitoring undertaken by DNRM and CSG companies, are shared and discussed at annual workshops.
CSG Online involves the installation of continuous monitoring loggers and telemetry on 60 strategically located sites with data available to the community ‘live and online’.
The new initiative is yielding multiple benefits.
- Landholders are empowered to monitor their own water wells in the knowledge that an improved and transparent monitoring framework is in place to protect their interests.
- Government has a more effective and efficient monitoring network and improved accountability and relationships with landholders.
- The new monitoring program uses the current level of operational resources but with an 8 fold greater spatial and 12 fold greater temporal monitoring footprint than the previous network.
- Results are used to independently cross-reference and verify groundwater monitoring results from CSG companies, providing enhanced community confidence in industry data.
The new monitoring program has been highly successful to date. Similar programs are being actively considered for use in other sectors in Queensland where operational activities associated with industries such as mining or shale gas may impact on landholder’s access to groundwater resources.