The Hidden Bill of Green Conflict: Derisking Renewable Energy by Strengthening Community Trust

Join this event launching IHRB's new research report: The Hidden Bill of Green Conflict, the culmination of our two-year research project into the costs of green conflict.

Speakers and participants will explore the report’s evidence and what it means for how renewable energy can be designed, financed and governed in order to strengthen trust and reduce conflict with communities.

The session will bring together practitioners from across the ecosystem to reflect on what evidence from this new report means for decision-making in real-world contexts. The discussion will explore questions including:

• Where do the costs of social conflict actually surface across the project lifecycle and value chain?
• Why do these dynamics remain difficult to track, price, and govern?
• What approaches are emerging to strengthen community trust and reduce conflict risk?

This event aims to move beyond diagnosis toward a more practical understanding of how the sector can strengthen community trust as a core component of effective transition delivery.

Welcome and Context (5 min)

Industry Discussion (55 min)

Audience Q&A and Close (15 min)

The session is designed for practitioners across the renewable energy ecosystem whose decisions influence how projects are financed, permitted, developed, and governed.

While community relations are often treated as a narrow “stakeholder engagement” issue, the research highlights how the costs of social conflict cascade across multiple functions within renewable energy enterprises and the wider investment and governance ecosystem.

This dialogue will bring together:

• Renewable energy developers and operators
• Investors and asset managers
• Insurers and legal practitioners
• Governments and local authorities
• Civil society and philanthropy

The global energy transition requires the rapid deployment of renewable energy at unprecedented speed and scale. At the same time, communities across many regions are asserting their right to shape how new energy infrastructure is planned and developed in their territories. Where projects are introduced without meaningful participation, transparency, or fair distribution of benefits, tensions can escalate into opposition, disputes, and conflict.

Across the sector, practitioners increasingly recognise that social conflict can carry material consequences - including delays, redesigns, financing complications, litigation, and reputational impacts that can cascade across portfolios.

These risks remain poorly understood and rarely tracked in a systematic way. Their financial and operational impacts are often dispersed across teams and functions, making them difficult to identify, aggregate, and govern.

For the last two years, IHRB's Costs of Green Conflict project has been researching and engaging wind and solar practitioners and their investors, insurers, government, and civil society partners on a key question: if the costs of social opposition and conflict experienced by the renewables industry were better understood, would relationships between companies and local communities receive greater priority and attention?

Throughout 2024 and 2025, our research has explored this question using through a comprehensive literature review of publicly available sources of data on renewables project costs; a comparative analysis of 47 cases of publicly reported and verified social conflict at wind and solar project sites; and interviews with more than 60 practitioners across 37 renewable energy companies, investors, law advisors, and civil society organisations, and field research in Colombia.

The evidence and insights gathered over this period have been synthesised into a practitioner-facing series of resources that will be launched as part of this event.