The Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) published a brief capturing key insights from a March 2025 dialogue to discuss the costs of conflict between renewable energy companies and communities. The dialogue included representatives from wind and solar companies and industry associations. It was held as part of an ongoing research project undertaken by IHRB to calculate the costs of green conflict, with the final research to be released in Q1 2026.
Human Level’s Take:
- Renewable energy development is an important engine of urgently needed climate action. The stakes are high and conflict between renewables companies and local stakeholders can derail or delay projects. Yet, renewable energy projects often operate with tight budgets and limited reserves, leaving fewer resources for social engagement and human rights, despite these being critical to project success.
- The costs of conflict can be hidden, as financial impacts of social conflict are often scattered and untracked across diverse stakeholders. This could lead to undervaluing the risk of community-company conflict and underinvestment in rights-based approaches.
- The rapid rollout of renewable projects, driven by climate urgency, can compromise meaningful community engagement, making early and ongoing stakeholder dialogue essential.
- Collaboration is key. The dispersed nature of renewables projects means cumulative impacts across companies, requiring collective action and peer coordination to effectively manage social risks.
- At the core, embedding human rights into company culture, governance and operations — and not siloed in sustainability functions — is crucial to addressing opposition and ensuring sustainable project outcomes.
- Ultimately, consideration for human rights risks and impacts needs to be baked into the process from the investment and planning stages, through development, deployment and closure. This requires upfront investments in strong human rights due diligence that can help to head off conflict with local stakeholders.
Some key takeaways:
- Unique sector considerations: Several key insights from the dialogue circled around the unique challenges posed by renewable energy business models and the overall sector. For example, there are often narrow margins and fewer reserve funds for renewable projects compared to other types of energy projects like oil and gas. For this reason, there may be limited resources for social engagement and human rights strategies. In addition, the brief notes that costs of conflict are often hidden, because they are spread across multiple cost centers within one company or across different actors like developers, investors, governments and communities. As a result, the costs of social conflict are not well tracked and could be undervalued, which may mean that resources are not driven towards implementing human rights-based approaches that could mitigate the risks of conflict. Similarly, the diffuse nature of renewables projects means that impacts can be cumulative across multiple companies — making collective action between neighbouring peers essential. Critically, the speed at which many projects are undertaken — driven by the urgency of the climate transition and booming investment — can also undermine efforts to respect human rights at planning and development stages of the process.
- Doing stakeholder engagement well is essential: Stakeholder engagement is fundamental to mitigating the risks of conflict. The brief points out that time and patience are needed to conduct effective community engagement and mitigate, prevent and remedy impacts. This a challenge for renewable projects often developed at high speed. As such, strong human rights due diligence at early stages of the process is crucial to “balance pace and patience.” That said, it is important to note that conflict and opposition can still arise even with strong engagement, making ongoing engagement even more important to build relationships over time. The brief also points out that hearing grievances can actually be a helpful indicator of effective community engagement, because it suggests that community members trust the process and offers additional opportunities to engage stakeholders and build relationships.
- Embedding human rights creates a bedrock: The brief highlights the importance of embedding human rights in renewables projects as the foundation for a strong human rights approach that can head off conflict. This includes strong governance and accountability mechanisms, and a tone from the top that embeds human rights as an ingrained part of the company culture. In addition, functions responsible for human rights and community engagement require sufficient resources and seniority within the business in order to carry out strong human rights due diligence, including meaningful stakeholder engagement. The brief notes that the maturity level and resources of community management functions are often “starkly different” from functions seen as more core to the business, like procurement. This can result in a “juniorisation” of sustainability and community relations roles that can limit their effectiveness. At the same time, responsibility for human rights should not only sit within the ESG or sustainability function, but should be mainstreamed throughout business functions. One way to bring human rights to the forefront is to identify social opposition as a key business risk.
