Onshore gas industry coexistence in Queensland
Damian BarrettResearch Director, Onshore Gas Program, CSIRO Energy and Director CSIRO Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance, CSIRO
The APPEA Journal 59(3) - https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ18314
Published: 21 June 2019
Abstract
Modern onshore gas development in the Surat Basin, Queensland, coexists with communities who have farmed land for multiple generations. Both agriculture and the gas industry bring different values, methods and cultures to these communities. CSIRO GISERA’s social research over the last six years in this region has documented community attitudes towards development of the industry. We have found that communities which adapt relatively well to industry development and operation are characterised by high quality environmental stewardship, abundant economic opportunities, strong community cohesion, and, trust in local decision making where information is transparent and shared. Conversely, adaptation by communities is relatively poor where procedural fairness is perceived to be distorted in favour of governments and the industry, governance procedures are not trusted, and, economic opportunities are not realised. These measures of acceptance of the gas industry change very slowly over time – on decade timescales rather than years and, hence, our work falsifies the misconception that it is possible to ‘manage’ community perception of the industry in the short term. Social acceptance of the gas industry is a complex interaction between perceived benefits and impacts of the industry, distributional fairness of those benefits and strong governance; particularly with regard to environmental regulation and protection of water resources. Robust, world class and trusted science has an important role to play in informing community understanding of the impacts and benefits of the industry and through this influencing the gas industry’s social acceptance.
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Dr Damian Barrett is Research Director of the Onshore Gas Program in CSIRO Energy and Director of the CSIRO ‘Gas Industry Social and Environmental Research Alliance’ (GISERA). He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Sustainable Minerals Institute, University of Queensland. Dr Barrett has over 28 years’ research experience in CSIRO, the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Greenhouse Accounting, eWater CRC and The University of Queensland. Dr Barrett graduated with a PhD from the Australian National University in 1993. He was a CSIRO Plant Industry Post-Doctoral Fellow between 1993 and 1994 and a Carnegie-Melon Foundation Visiting Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, USA, in 1995. From 1996 to 2003, Dr Barrett worked in the CSIRO Climate Change Science Program and CRC Greenhouse Accounting on continental scale coupled models of the carbon and water cycle. Between 2004 and 2008, Dr. Barrett was appointed Research Stream Leader of the Environmental Remote Sensing Group in CSIRO Land and Water. He was also Principal Investigator of the NASA ‘Carbon, Water and Energy Fluxes of Tropical Savannas’ Project. In July 2008, Dr Barrett was appointed Professorial Research Fellow at the Sustainable Minerals Institute, University of Queensland, and was Director of the Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry between 2009 and 2012. He returned to CSIRO in 2012 where his research interests have focussed on environmental issues associated with the mining and petroleum sectors. Dr Barrett has presented at more than 40 national and international workshops and conferences in the last 10 years on topics as diverse as water availability forecasting, the global terrestrial carbon cycle and greenhouse gas mitigation, satellite modelling of water and carbon cycles, human impacts and global change, sustainability, mining and biodiversity, and water management in the resources sector. He has published more than 120 refereed papers, been cited more than 3700 times and has an H-index of 28. Dr Barrett’s research interests include environmental biophysics, mathematical inverse modelling, physical hydrology, ecosystem services and sustainable development. |
