Executive summary

As India accelerates its renewable energy (RE) deployment to meet climate goals, the sector faces a critical challenge: rising on-ground concerns regarding land availability, and the potential adverse impact of RE projects on people’s livelihoods and the surrounding environment. It is particularly true for large-scale RE projects that require significant land, often impacting the livelihoods of local communities, and biodiversity. If not proactively managed, these impacts can lead to social and ecological challenges, potentially slowing RE deployment.

While several social and environmental impact assessment frameworks are available from various international agencies , they are often difficult to implement thoroughly by RE project developers due to lack of local context and linkage with different phases of the RE project. Hence, more actionable guidance is needed for the RE sector so developers can plan their projects in a manner that avoids any adverse impact on people and the environment.

The Guidebook for Responsible Deployment of Renewable Energy, developed by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) as part of the Responsible Energy Initiative (REI) India, serves as a practical, step-by-step manual for RE projects to manage their social and environmental impact. Inspired by the standard documents available such as Equator Principles, IFC performance standards, Asian Development Bank’s Environment and Social Framework, Equitable Origin’s EO100, Clean Energy Buyers Institute’s Beyond the Megawatt, Securities and Exchange Board of India’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting and others, it provides actionable guidance to move beyond mere legal or financial compliance towards a model of deployment that is people-centric and ecologically positive. This approach also ensures RE projects advance both climate action and biodiversity conservation in tandem, serving multiple environmental goals simultaneously.

The Guidebook’s target audience includes RE developers, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies, and contractors involved in RE project deployment, such as detailed project report (DPR) consultants, impact assessment agencies, and land aggregators. It provides specific activities organised across four key themes:

• Land: Support users in choosing low-impact land parcels for development, understanding land use patterns, and ensuring transparent and fair land procurement.
• People and ecology: Focuses on preventive measures for social impact mitigation, effective grievance management, and community developmen. It also includes measures for community health and safety, preservation of cultural heritage, and increased equity in project practices.
• Business responsibility: Aims to ensure effective coordination and alignment among all actors engaged in a RE project towards responsible practices.
• Environment and biodiversity: Supports projects to minimise impact on the local environment while undertaking biodiversity strengthening and site restoration after decommissioning.

The activities in the Guidebook are organised into four parts – as per the project deployment cycle, ensuring responsibility is embedded from conception to closure. These four phases are:

• Pre-feasibility and bid approval: Focuses on low-impact siting—selecting land parcels with minimal environmental and social risks—and conducting initial social assessments to understand local dynamics.
• Site preparation: Involves conducting a third-party environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA), developing an environment and social management and monitoring plan (ESMMP), and establishing a grievance redressal mechanism (GRM). It also covers stakeholder engagement and community input.
• Construction and commissioning: Emphasises strict adherence to labour rights, community health and safety, and responsible waste management. This phase includes implementing the ESMMP and working towards achieving biodiversity net gain.
• Operations and maintenance (O&M): Focuses on long-term sustainability through ongoing community communication, development activities, monitoring of biodiversity net gain, and early planning for decommissioning and site restoration.

The Guidebook also helps companies self-evaluate and chart a path for continuous improvement. Users can evaluate their performance in a project based on the responsible activities implemented. Performance is divided into four levels:

• Level 0: Compliant – Adheres to existing national and state laws.
• Level 1: Adopter – Implements mainstream industry best practices albeit those with short-term sustenance, and ensures business integrity in the organisation/company.
• Level 2: Leader – Adopts international best practices, develops mechanism for mediumterm community development, and ensures business integrity among partners.
• Level 3: Pioneer – Innovates new practices, advocates for ecosystem-wide integrity, and creates self-sustaining systems.

By adopting this Guidebook, RE developers can mitigate project risks and secure a social licence to operate. It will also help them make their projects more investor-friendly by building necessary systems within the organisation.

Responsible deployment of RE is not a choice but an imperative. It offers a synergistic pathway to meet climate, developmental, and biodiversity goals simultaneously, transcending the perceived trade-off between these priorities.