A Historic Conference on the Fossil Fuel Phaseout Is Happening Right Now
The first global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels comes amidst a war-driven energy crisis and an accelerating climate emergency.
Santa Marta, Colombia. Credit: J@YGS via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
In the Colombian port city of Santa Marta, a landmark global climate conference in underway with discussions around phasing out fossil fuels front and center on the agenda. Co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands, the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels marks, as Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative founder and chair Tzeporah Berman put it, “a historic moment.” With global fossil fuel energy markets in disarray and scientific warnings that planetary heating is accelerating, the need to work out an exit strategy away from reliance on oil, gas, and coal has never been greater. And now, for the first time, countries and stakeholders who understand this and are committed to the transition to cleaner, more sustainable alternatives are coming together to begin to lay the groundwork to make that transition happen.
“Everyone coming to Santa Marta agrees that the transition away from fossil fuels must happen. The key question now is how do we make it succeed, and how do we accelerate it?” Stientje van Veldhoven, minister of climate policy and green growth for the Netherlands, said during a public briefing on the conference last month.
So what exactly is this conference in Santa Marta, why is it so significant with everything else that is happening in the world (wars, cost of living crisis and inflation, etc.), and what can we expect will come out of it?
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All About Implementation
Colombia and the Netherlands announced their plan for the first international conference on the just transition away from fossil fuels during the COP30 UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil last November. The annual UN gatherings are supposed to be the forum where the world discusses how it will tackle the defining challenge of our time – the climate emergency – but swarms of fossil fuel lobbyists and petrostates have largely prevented any meaningful dialogue on addressing the root cause of the problem. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia, for example, blocked the adoption of plan for phasing out fossil fuels at COP30, despite more than 80 countries backing calls to develop such a roadmap. The UN climate conferences are run under UN rules of consensus, meaning that any decisions made require unanimity, which allows one country or a small handful of them to obstruct proposals that have majority support.
The conference taking place right now in Santa Marta is not following UN rules, specifically for that reason. According to Covering Climate Now executive director Mark Hertsgaard, the decision to not adhere to UN rules is one reason why this conference could be a “game changer.”
It is the first international convening of its kind aiming to discuss the nuts and bolts of how to transition away from fossil fuels. According to the conference website, its objective is to “initiate a concrete process through which a coalition of committed countries, subnational governments, and relevant stakeholders can identify and advance enabling pathways to implement a progressive transition away from fossil fuels creating sustainable societies and economies.” In other words, it’s all about implementation.
“The conference is not a negotiating space,” said Daniela Duran, head of international affairs of the Ministry for Environment and Sustainable Development for Colombia. “We are seeing Santa Marta as a dedicated platform for implementation.”
The participants represent what has been referred to as a “coalition of the willing.” There will be no skeptics or obstructors. Fossil fuel lobbyists are not allowed in the door.
Nearly 60 countries are taking part in this historic conference. They include both fossil fuel producers and fossil fuel importers, and large and small economies. The host country of Colombia is a fossil fuel producer; Santa Marta, the host city, is a hub for coal exports. Canada, Australia, Norway, and Nigeria are some of the other producer countries that are participating.
Other stakeholders represented include scientists and academics, civil society, Indigenous leaders, subnational governments, and businesses.
The conference is taking place from April 24 to April 29. During this time there are several sub-conferences and gatherings happening, designed to engage specific stakeholder groups. On April 24-25, climate scientists and energy transition experts are leading an academic dialogue discussing concrete pathways for advancing a fossil fuel phaseout. As Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a leading Earth system scientist, told global media platform We Don’t Have Time in an interview, “It will be an independent, international panel with energy experts doing updated pathway analysis on what needs to be accomplished sector by sector, country by country, from now until 2030. But also focusing on mapping policy options.”
There is also a People’s Summit happening on April 24-26 where civil society organizations are huddling to discuss their visions and demands, which will be communicated to state delegates in an Assembly of the People on April 27.
The final two days, April 28-29, will be the high-level segment featuring country delegates and government ministers engaging in dialogue with representatives from academia and civil society.
Three thematic pillars are guiding the discussions. First, how to overcome economic dependency on fossil fuels. Second, transforming fossil fuel supply and demand. And third, strengthening international cooperation and climate diplomacy.
“The conference can be a turning point where a coalition of doers or coalition of the willing takes steps towards ending new licensing for fossil fuel exploration, addressing fossil fuel subsidies while protecting the most vulnerable, and working toward a managed transition away from fossil fuel production and consumption,” Natalie Jones, senior policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said during an April 21 media briefing ahead of the event.
“Fossil Fuel Dependence is a Trap”
The Santa Marta conference comes at a particularly fraught time geopolitically, and when international diplomacy and the international rule of law are under incredible strain.
“The United States and Israel have waged an illegal war against Iran, and the consequences have been felt around the world. Not just the erosion of the rule of international law, but also economic impacts far beyond the Middle East, showing why a just transition to renewable energy is now a security imperative,” Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and founding member of The Elders, said during the recent media briefing.
The Iran war and closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created what the International Energy Agency says is the biggest disruption to global oil supply in history. This has driven up prices at the pump and, since so much of our economies are built around oil and gas, costs on most other things are also rising.
“I don’t know that we could put it into any clearer terms that fossil fuel dependence is an economic liability and a growing security risk,” said Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub.
“This global energy crisis that we are facing today with its price shocks and geopolitical instability painfully proves our point on a devastating scale - fossil fuel dependence is a trap,” Maina Talia, Minister of Home Affairs, Climate Change and Environment for Tuvalu, said during an April 9 webinar hosted by Climate Home News.
The conference of course was already planned before the US and Israel started bombing Iran sparking a global fossil fuel crisis, but the conflict only further illustrates the urgency of charting a course away from volatile fossil fuels.
“At a time of escalating military conflicts and mounting planetary crises, it has never been more urgent to move off fossil fuels than it is today,” Nikki Reisch, director of the Climate and Energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a statement. “Continued dependence on oil, gas, and coal is a colossal vulnerability and a growing liability that only deepens human suffering.”
A Scientific Imperative – And a Legal Obligation
The need to transition away from fossil fuels is firmly grounded in science. And the science is very clear. As Covering Climate Now’s Hertsgaard explained: “There is no dispute, zero, within the scientific community that humanity must phase out fossil fuels rapidly if we are going to limit global temperature rise to an amount that our civilization can survive.”
In a 2024 paper published in the journal BioScience, for example, top climate and Earth systems scientists warned that we are facing “a global emergency beyond any doubt” and a “dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.” The top priority, they said, should be rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use.
Last year in a review published in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change, scientists issued another urgent warning that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are driving interlinked crises threatening human health, biodiversity, ecological integrity and the stability of our planet. “The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity and lead author of the study, said in an accompanying statement. “Oil, gas and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past.”
That is why the discussions happening currently in Santa Marta matter. The science tells us that phasing out fossil fuels is an urgent necessity. It is also a matter of justice and a legal obligation.
The International Court of Justice – the world’s highest court – affirmed this in its historic advisory opinion on climate change issued last July. The court clarified that all countries are required under multiple sources of international law to protect the climate system, including by addressing the core drivers of greenhouse gas emissions – fossil fuels being at the top of the list. The court even suggested that continued fossil fuel activities, like licensing, production and consumption, and subsidizing, could be considered “internationally wrongful acts.”
“Breaking free from fossil fuels is no longer just a political obligation. It’s a legal one, because of the ICJ’s advisory opinion,” Robinson said.
She and over 250 other legal experts signed an open letter, released on the opening day of the conference, explaining the legal foundations for a fossil fuel phaseout. The signatories argue that the phaseout is not optional, but rather legally mandatory.
“The phaseout of fossil fuels is not just scientifically necessary to prevent catastrophic and irreversible harm to the climate system, all peoples and ecosystems; it is legally required,” the letter concludes.
“Courts and tribunals around the world have articulated States’ significant legal obligations to address climate change. States can only meaningfully address climate change by phasing out fossil fuel energy sources. Thereby, States are legally required to transition away from fossil fuel use. It’s as simple as that,” said Paul Rink, associate professor of law at Seton Hall Law School and one of the letter’s signatories.
A Critical Starting Point
Once the conference in Santa Marta wraps up on April 29, what happens next? Will the discussions and momentum carry forward into other spaces and upcoming climate conferences? Will the “coalition of the willing” expand to include even more countries, and will any pledges or commitments announced during the event translate into real action?
That all remains to be seen. What we do know is that the main outcome of the conference will be a published report summarizing the key points and input gathered. Organizers also intend for there to be a second conference to take place hopefully next year, to build upon the groundwork laid during this initial gathering.
What the Santa Marta conference represents, therefore, is a starting point. There is no expectation that all of the thorny issues will get resolved in a matter of days. The transition away from fossil fuels is complex, and it is hard. But progress has to start somewhere. As Bastiaan Hassing, the Netherlands representative for climate policy and green growth, explained during a recent Covering Climate Now press briefing about the conference: “This is hopefully the start of a longer running process where we can get together in an atmosphere where we don’t negotiate, but talk about what we can do together to speed up this transition.”