Exploring community benefit agreements

Across the country, regulators are paying increased attention to the social impacts of wind energy projects on local communities, including on landholders, traditional owners and other groups who may be impacted. Social impacts are wide ranging and varied, including impacts on labour pools, impacts on the availability of emergency and other community services, and impacts on community infrastructure. Coupled with this increased focus on social impacts, is the firm belief from communities and regulators that local communities should share in the benefits of the renewable energy transition. These two inter-related matters heighten the need for project developers and operators to ensure that a robust social licence from the community. These social licence requirements are increasingly becoming formalised through the adoption of mandatory community benefit sharing arrangements grounded in statutory requirements, including the development and implementation of social impact management plans and community benefit agreements (CBAs)with host local councils. In this session, I will explore community benefit agreement regime in Australia with a focus on the novel obligation in Queensland for wind farm projects to have CBAs executed before the lodging of a development application, pulling on key learnings from advising on and negotiating some of the first of these agreements.