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just transition
'Leaving the US Behind,' 50+ Nations Gather in Colombia to 'Phase Out Fossil Fuels'
"Word on the street is NO fossil fuel lobbyists at the Santa Marta, Colombia 'Transition Away' conference," said one climate journalist.
Apr 24, 2026
Representatives of more than 50 countries on Friday kicked off the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia, a hopeful summit that comes amid a worsening global climate crisis and fossil fuel-producing nations' efforts to block a clean energy transition.
Organizers of the conference—which is taking place in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta and is co-hosted by the Netherlands—said participants aim 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."
"This process will be informed by the experience and perspectives of national and subnational governments, academia, Indigenous peoples, peoples of African descent, peasants, civil society, workers, the private sector, and other key actors at different stages of the transition," the organizers added.
The conference comes amid widespread disappointment and frustration over what climate defenders called a "shamefully weak" draft text—called the Multirão Decision—produced at last November's United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Brazil. The final document removed all mentions of fossil fuels amid pressure from oil and gas-producing nations like the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and the presence of a record number of industry lobbyists.
“When multilateral processes move slowly, concrete alliances of the willing can take us a long way," German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week at the 17th Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Hesse state, where high-level representatives from around 40 countries discussed "concrete steps towards overcoming the climate crisis."
I've worked on #climate and fossil fuels for almost 30 years and the Santa Marta Conference is definitely one of the most hopeful things I've seen. Finally some governments are exploring solutions that meet the scale of the crisis. Good explainer 🧵👇
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— Patrick Reinsborough ❌👑 (@giantwhispers.bsky.social) April 24, 2026 at 7:57 AM
The Santa Marta conference, which will run through April 29, will focus on three main areas:
- Overcoming economic dependence on fossil fuels;
- Transforming energy supply and demand; and
- Advancing international cooperation and climate diplomacy.
Major fossil fuel producers including Angola, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, and the United Kingdom are among the 54 nations represented in Santa Marta.
Notably absent from the conference are some of the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluters, including the United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan. Their absence is fine with Colombian Environmental Minister Irene Vélez Torres, who told The Guardian that “this is not the space for them."
"We are not going to have boycotters or climate denialists at the table,” Vélez said.
Also missing by design are the legions of lobbyists who increasingly swarm COP conferences.
Word on the street is NO fossil fuel lobbyists at the Santa Marta, Colombia 'Transition Away' conference. But it does have some of the best climate scientists in the world for an advisory panel.
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— Bob Berwyn (@bberwyn.bsky.social) April 24, 2026 at 11:15 AM
Former Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who heads the World Wildlife Fund's global climate division, said in a statement that "changing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels isn’t a slow problem with a slow solution: We need a rapid, global shift to renewable power, smarter grids, and efficiency, so emissions fall fast and stay down."
"And we need a ‘coalition of the willing’ to show us the way," he added. "Santa Marta is an inflection point and an opportunity that we should not miss.”
The absence of the United States surprised no one, given the Trump administration and Republicans' promotion of oil, gas, and coal. Big Oil invested $445 million during the 2024 election cycle in efforts to elect Trump and other Republicans and promote fossil fuel-friendly policies.
Trump, who ran on a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy, has signed a series of executive orders aimed at boosting fossil fuel production, including by declaring a fake “energy emergency” in a push to fast-track permit approvals. He also tapped former fossil fuel executives to head the Department of Energy and Interior Department, which have pursued a policy of opening up more public lands and waters for fossil fuel development.
At the same time, the Trump administration dropped out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time and moved to roll back the modest climate progress achieved under former President Joe Biden.
Melinda Lewis—who directs the Global Trade Watch program at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen—is attending the Santa Marta conference, where she is working to dismantle the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system. The enforced mechanism empowers multinational corporations to sue governments before panels of corporate attorneys and has been denounced by opponents—especially those in the Global South—as a novel form of colonialism.
"While it is tragic that the United States government is failing to meet this critical moment for climate action, we are encouraged that the rest of the world has recognized that it’s high time to take bold action to remove the arcane ISDS extra-legal instrument buried in trade and investment treaties that has been used as a cudgel by fossil fuel and extractive industries to stymie government actions that might reduce their profits," Lewis said on Friday.
As Canadian researcher Joseph Bouchard recently wrote in a Common Dreams opinion piece, "Colombia is especially exposed" to ISDS harm, as "the country has 129 oil and gas projects covered by ISDS provisions, leaving it vulnerable to a wave of potential claims as it pursues its energy transition."
Lewis noted that Colombia's government, led by leftist President Gustavo Petro, "recently announced its intention to renounce its treaties that include ISDS as part of the full package of needed action to usher in a clean energy transition."
Indigenous leaders said more must be done to ensure a just transition.
“We are very concerned. We talk about a just transition, but in practice it is not true,” Oswaldo Muca, General Coordinator of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, told Inter Press Service. “Mining continues. Extraction continues. Deforestation continues. The territories and Indigenous peoples continue suffering this problem, and it is becoming more serious every day."
Muca added that benefits from resource extraction "do not reach Indigenous territories, but they destroy the territory and leave the damage."
On Friday, more than 250 legal experts from around the world asserted that "phasing out fossil fuels is not a political choice—it is a legal obligation."
The jurists noted in an open letter that "the International Court of Justice (ICJ) unanimously confirmed that every state must use all means at its disposal to prevent significant harm to the climate system, including by avoiding the principal activities driving it: fossil fuel production and use."
The letter's signers include former Irish President Mary Robinson and Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer from Guam who played a key role in winning the ICJ climate case.
"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," they wrote. "It is also socially, economically, and environmentally beneficial for present and future generations."
Ultimately, countries participating in the Santa Marta conference will draw their own individual roadmaps with the help of scientists and other experts.
“If we think about it," said Vélez, "the conference is that turning point where, collectively, we decide to be on the right side of history."
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What the First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels Must Achieve
Civil society will push states to act in line with their existing legal obligations to phase out all fossil fuels—including by advancing a Fossil Fuel Treaty that can govern a just and rights-based transition.
Apr 23, 2026
Governments and climate leaders gather this month in Santa Marta, Colombia for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. This landmark conference is happening as millions suffer from devastating and unlawful wars, and the global economy reels from oil price shocks. The task for those attending is clear: not to debate whether to phase out fossil fuels but to determine how to do it—rapidly, fairly, and in line with science and the law.
Co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands (April 24–29), the Santa Marta conference will gather more than 50 countries from around the world to work on implementing a managed, financed, and equitable fossil fuel phaseout. That the gathering is happening is itself progress, particularly after decades of obstruction at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where a handful of countries have held climate action hostage and made fossil fuels taboo.
The enthusiasm the conference has generated—and the written submissions it has elicited on strategies to overcome economic dependence on oil, gas, and coal; transform supply and demand; and advance international cooperation and diplomacy—signals a turning point. The momentum for coordinated global action to move away from fossil fuels is unstoppable.
This conference could not come at a more crucial time, as the escalating climate crisis, mounting geopolitical turmoil, and violent conflicts deepen human suffering, upend economies, and lay bare why continued dependence on fossil fuels is a colossal vulnerability. It has never been more urgent to leave behind oil, gas, and coal than it is today.
Phasing out oil, gas, and coal is not just a scientific necessity and a legal obligation, it’s also an opportunity to break free from a destructive system.
The Center for International Environmental Law, along with other civil society organizations, Indigenous Peoples, and frontline communities, will be present in Santa Marta. We will push states to act in line with their existing legal obligations to phase out all fossil fuels—including by advancing a Fossil Fuel Treaty that can govern a just and rights-based transition.
The Duty to Phase Out Fossil Fuels
Less than a year ago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) clarified that states have obligations under multiple sources of international law to prevent climate harm and protect the climate system. The court also affirmed that states have a duty to cooperate—effectively and in good faith—toward that end. Meeting these obligations requires coordinated action to address the primary driver of climate change: fossil fuels.
The implications are clear. States must cooperate to tackle the policies, norms, and practices that lock in fossil fuel production, facilitate expansion, delay phaseout, and sustain the fossil economy. This includes eliminating mechanisms like Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) that allow fossil fuel companies to demand compensation when governments take climate action, potentially making it prohibitive for countries to comply with their phaseout obligations. The law requires ending new fossil fuel licensing and public subsidies; halting the buildout of oil and gas—especially in the ocean; tackling petrochemicals used for products like plastics and ammonia; and rejecting dangerous distractions like carbon capture, offsets, and geoengineering, which only prolong the fossil fuel era and introduce new risks.
Why Santa Marta Must Advance a Pathway for a Fossil Fuel Treaty
A legally binding international agreement focused on fossil fuel supply—a Fossil Fuel Treaty—would provide a framework for countries to cooperate effectively on the phaseout of oil, gas, and coal, and manage the transition in a just and equitable way. In doing so, it would fill a governance gap on fossil fuels, while complementing and supporting existing multilateral processes under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. These processes focus largely on climate action at the national level, including through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for emissions reduction and adaptation, with support and finance based on historical responsibility and equity.
The Santa Marta conference offers a critical opportunity to build support for the negotiation of a Fossil Fuel Treaty that facilitates reciprocal and collective state action toward a fossil-free future. A treaty would enable countries to align timelines, shape how phaseout unfolds, remove barriers to the transition, and reduce the costs while increasing the benefits of leaving oil, gas, and coal behind.
What a Credible Transition Requires
As States gather in Santa Marta, several issues must be on the table:
Eliminating Barriers to Phase Out
States can’t comply with their legal duties to phase out fossil fuels if they risk being sued by fossil fuel investors for enormous sums of money. Yet, ISDS allows just that, making it prohibitively costly for states to curb fossil fuel production, consumption, licensing, and subsidies as science demands and the law requires. At Santa Marta, we will look for states to recognize ISDS as a structural barrier to phaseout and take steps to dismantle it.
Speculative, ineffective, and harmful responses to climate change, such as carbon capture, offsets, and geoengineering, are additional barriers that delay phaseout and divert resources from proven climate solutions. These dangerous technologies perpetuate the myth that we can “manage” emissions rather than phase fossil fuels out. Instead of subsidizing such approaches, public funds should be directed toward measures that prevent further climate harm by rooting out its source: fossil fuel production and use. Governments must also support strict limits on geoengineering and advance a global non-use agreement.
Moving Toward a Fossil-Free Ocean
The fossil fuel industry is increasingly turning to the ocean as a new frontier for oil and gas development, despite the legal and scientific imperative to phase out fossil fuels. Halting the expansion of offshore oil and gas—starting with an end to new licensing—is a necessary step for states to meet their legal obligations to prevent marine pollution and climate harm, as clarified by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and the ICJ.
Marine health is critical to ecological integrity, human rights, and climate stability. Protecting the ocean is vital for all life that depends on it. There can be no fossil-free future without a fossil-free ocean.
Cutting the Industry’s Lifeline
Santa Marta needs to address drivers of fossil fuel supply and demand beyond energy—especially petrochemicals like those used in plastics and ammonia. As demand for fossil fuels declines in the energy and transport sectors, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly relying on petrochemicals to sustain growth. A credible transition requires that states halt petrochemical expansion—especially new plastics and ammonia infrastructure.
Financing the Transition
A just transition away from fossil fuels must be funded by those most responsible for the climate crisis. This means that the largest cumulative polluters act first and fastest to phase out fossil fuels, as well as provide adequate finance and support to low income countries, including debt relief, reparations, and contributions to address mounting loss and damage from climate change. Adequate funds are available if they are just allocated appropriately. Ending the subsidies that prop up the fossil economy, including financing and tax breaks for fossil fuel production and speculative technologies, and defunding militarization and war, would free up billions if not trillions in public finance that could be put toward a just transition.
Delivering a Just, Rights-Based Transition
To chart the path to a livable, fossil-free future for all, the discussions in Santa Marta must be grounded in the law, rooted in human rights, and responsive to demands for justice and accountability. That requires centering communities, honoring the leadership and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, and listening to those on the frontlines of the climate crisis and the forefront of real climate solutions. The rapid and equitable transition away from fossil fuels will not be dictated from on high or administered top-down. To achieve transformational change, we must transform the way we make policy and take action, ensuring meaningful participation by those whose lives and livelihoods, histories, and futures are on the line.
Phasing out oil, gas, and coal is not just a scientific necessity and a legal obligation, it’s also an opportunity to break free from a destructive system. On the journey to a fossil-free future, Santa Marta can be a turning point where a "coalition of doers" commits to a dedicated forum for coordinated action on fossil fuel phaseout, including a follow-on conference to begin negotiating a Fossil Fuel Treaty. Countries must cooperate effectively to leave oil, gas, and coal behind so that, together, we can walk the path ahead.
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Why a Feminist and Just Energy Transition Is the Only Way Out of the Climate Crisis
As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it.
Apr 21, 2026
Wars, invasions, blockades, and genocide from Venezuela and Iran to Palestine have ripped the curtain off the inherent volatility and violence of the fossil energy system. We need a rapid and just scale-up of socially controlled renewables to end the era of fossil fuels. But ensuring a just transition requires deeper conversation. Who benefits from the energy transition? Who bears the cost? Who gets a say in how energy is produced? These are also feminist questions about power, labor, care, and whose lives are valued.
To answer them, grassroots leaders, Indigenous communities, trade unions, and environmental justice activists will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia for the Peoples’ Summit and First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels this week. For many of us in environmental and social justice movements, this gathering represents both urgency and possibility. This will be a critical space because, without justice, the energy transition will reproduce the same systems of extraction, control, and violence.
So We Must Ask: an Energy Transition for Whom?
The transition narrative sold by corporations and rich countries today tells us we can scale up corporate, market-led renewable energy technologies without questioning who controls them, who benefits, and who bears the cost. This risks the transition becoming nothing more than the old model in greener packaging. In Malaysia, for example, the energy transition policy largely rebrands the old growth-and-extraction model. It uses green rhetoric, prioritizing corporate-led false solutions like carbon capture and storage and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Copying Western-style developments through corporate-driven trade and investment patterns sustains fossil fuel dependence and continues to entrench structural inequalities both nationally and internationally. Without systemic change, the transition becomes another chapter in a long history of resource plunder, particularly in the Global South.
Consider the surge in demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements. These are essential components of batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. Governments and corporations in the Global North are racing to secure these materials, often greenwashing extraction as necessary for climate action, while diverting these minerals into military, aerospace, AI, and data centers. For communities across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this rush is already translating into land grabs, water depletion, labor exploitation, and violence. Lithium extraction threatens fragile ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods; cobalt mining has been linked to dangerous working conditions and child labor. As with oil before them, critical minerals are becoming objects of geopolitical competition—backed by military power and strategic control.
If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.
The military is among the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels, yet its emissions are routinely excluded from national reporting. At the same time, states and corporations work together to secure control over oil, gas, and critical minerals—profiting from war and devastation from Lebanon to Venezuela and Cuba.
These are the very predictable outcomes of a system that prioritizes profit over energy as a right for people. A just transition must go far beyond emissions reductions. It must actively confront inequality, redistribute power, and wealth, and repair historical and ongoing harms. It must center those who have been marginalized and exploited—not as victims but as leaders.
A Just Transition Must Be Based on Peoples’ Sovereignty and Energy Sovereignty
At the heart of this vision are peoples’ sovereignty and energy sovereignty: the right of communities to control their lands, resources, and energy systems, and to shape the decisions that affect their lives. This means treating energy as a common good that is managed for collective well-being rather than private profit, while building energy democracy, where communities have real decision-making power over how energy is produced and used. It also requires energy sufficiency, prioritizing meeting people’s needs over excessive and wasteful energy use. Together, these principles challenge the concentration of power in corporations and wealthy countries, and point toward energy systems that are locally rooted, democratic, and aligned with social and ecological needs.
Achieving this also requires that we confront imperialism. The current global order allows wealthy countries to externalize the social and environmental costs of their consumption to the Global South, while maintaining control over finance, technology, and trade. This imbalance shapes the terms of the energy transition, devastating communities and often locking countries in the Global South into roles as raw material suppliers rather than equal partners.
Policies that ignore power dynamics may deliver short-term emissions reductions, but they will ultimately fail as communities resist exploitation and inequity deepens. A transition rooted in justice, however, can build the broad-based support needed for transformative change.
Around the world, communities are already practicing energy sovereignty, from managing decentralized renewable systems in Palestine to asserting their rights against extractive projects in Mozambique. Alternatives are not only possible, but underway.
A feminist and just energy transition must challenge the structures that perpetuate dependency and inequality, including unfair trade agreements, debt regimes, and corporate impunity. It must also recognize and address the intersecting forms of oppression based on gender, race, class, and colonial history that shape how the climate crisis is experienced and resisted.
As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it. If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.
The path forward will require confronting entrenched interests and reimagining our economies and societies. From Santa Marta and beyond, communities are showing us the way. The task now is to listen, to act, and to ensure that the transition ahead is truly just—for people, for the planet, and for future generations.
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