I almost wrote this as a story about a resolved case. In October 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that two wind farms built at Fosen, on land the Sami people have used for reindeer herding for centuries, violated their rights under international human rights conventions. That sounded like an ending. It wasn’t one.
The turbines are still there. More than four years after the ruling, the Storheia and Roan wind farms, part of the largest onshore wind development in Europe, are still operating on land a court already found the government had no right to use this way. Reindeer herders say the size and noise of the turbines frighten their animals and disrupt migration patterns that predate the wind farms by centuries. The affected herding families have been in mediation since the ruling. As of the most recent reporting, no resolution has been announced.
That gap, a legal ruling that hasn’t yet translated into a changed outcome on the ground, is the part of this story that doesn’t fit neatly into a headline. It’s a reminder that a court decision and a physical resolution can be two very different timelines.
The pattern isn’t isolated to one project. In 2025, a proposed copper mine at Repparfjord, in Norway’s far north, drew renewed attention for similar reasons. The mine, owned by a Canadian company, is marketed partly as supporting the green transition, since copper is a critical mineral for electric vehicle batteries and renewable infrastructure. Researchers have raised concerns that the project could affect both the fjord’s ecosystem and reindeer migration routes that pass directly through the proposed construction site. A 2025 Amnesty International report specifically found that Norwegian regulations lack safeguards requiring free, prior, and informed consent from Sami institutions before land use projects like this one move forward.
That phrase, free, prior, and informed consent, is doing real work in this story. It’s a specific standard, not just a nice sentiment, and its absence is one mechanism by which projects branded as green can still land on Sami territory without full agreement from the people living there.
I don’t think there’s a clean lesson here about renewable energy being bad. Wind and copper are both central to reducing carbon emissions, and that matters. What I take from Fosen and Repparfjord instead is narrower, a court ruling isn’t automatically the same thing as a resolved outcome, and a green label on a project doesn’t automatically mean every stakeholder’s consent was fully secured.
Sources. Norway Supreme Court ruling (2021, Fosen case); Amnesty International (2025 report).