Colombia climate conference closes with push to end oil, gas and coal

More than 50 countries have concluded the world's first intergovernmental conference dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, with participants invoking the Iran war's disruption to global energy markets as fresh evidence that oil and gas dependence has become a strategic liability as much as a climate threat.

Ministers and senior officials from close to 60 countries gathered in the Colombian coal-port city for the high-level segment of the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands. The two-day ministerial phase, which wrapped up on April 29 with a co-chairs' statement and a summary report, capped a week-long gathering that also featured academic and civil society events.

Dissatisfaction with the annual UN climate process lay behind the conference's creation. At November's UN climate summit in the Amazonian city of Belém, Brazil, more than 80 countries backed a proposal to establish a fossil fuel phase-out roadmap, but the talks closed without agreement on one. Colombia and the Netherlands subsequently announced the Santa Marta gathering as a parallel forum explicitly focused on the production and consumption of coal, oil and gas, an issue that consensus-based UN talks have consistently struggled to address directly.

"The conclusion is unavoidable, we must transition away from fossil fuels — not just because it's good for climate, but because it strengthens our energy independence and security," said Stientje van Veldhoven, the Netherlands' minister for climate policy and green growth, who co-presided over the talks.

The EU's climate envoy, Wopke Hoekstra, pointed to the economic cost of Europe's continued energy dependence. "We in Europe...are losing half a billion euros each day this war continues," he told delegates, adding that commercial and security imperatives now reinforced the climate case for moving away from hydrocarbons.

The energy crisis triggered by the US-Israeli attack on Iran cast a long shadow over proceedings. Colombia's environment minister, Irene Vélez Torres, who also co-presided over the talks, argued the timing had proved the conference's premise. "There is a lot of energy stress, there is energy scarcity and it's going to be very difficult for the energy market, and the oil market particularly, to recover any time soon," she told The Guardian.

The UK's climate envoy, Rachel Kyte, said the geopolitical context had altered how governments were framing the debate. "Some people use independence, some people use sovereignty, but basically they need energy security," she told AFP. "Increasingly, the world is concluding that fossil fuels are a source of instability."

The conference drew 56 confirmed countries and more than 2,600 organisations, accounting for roughly a fifth of global fossil fuel production and a third of global consumption. Among those present were significant hydrocarbon producers including Australia, Canada, Norway, Nigeria, Angola, Mexico and Brazil, as well as heavy coal users such as Turkey and Vietnam and several Pacific island nations facing acute climate risks. The US, the world's largest oil and gas producer, did not attend, with the Trump administration's State Department rejecting the conference's premise outright, dismissing the shift away from hydrocarbons as destructive and declaring Washington would play no part in what it called a "bogus climate agenda." China, Russia and Gulf oil states were also absent.

France arrived with a concrete national commitment, publishing a domestic transition roadmap that sets 2030 as the deadline for eliminating coal from its energy system, 2045 for oil and 2050 for gas.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro warned delegates that climate tipping points were already approaching, saying "the Amazon rainforest is burning" and that "without it we reach a point of no return." He argued that current armed conflicts were bound up in geopolitical competition over fossil resources, a view echoed by Vélez, who drew a direct connection between the hydrocarbon economy and armed conflict at the global scale.

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the opening plenary that a breach of the 1.5C warming threshold was now "inevitable" within the coming decade. Returning from that overshoot remained scientifically possible, he said, but required accelerating transitions away from fossil fuels. Addressing the assembled governments, he said he had never, in his career as a scientist, felt such grounds for encouragement.

Finance remained a central fault line. Delegates reiterated concerns raised earlier in the week that borrowing costs for renewable projects can reach around 15% in parts of Africa, against roughly 2% in Europe and North America, a disparity that leaves fossil fuel investment comparatively less accessible to capital-constrained economies. Maina Talia, from the government of Tuvalu, told a Climate Home News press conference that the summit needed to deliver "a financial mechanism that can actually reach out to our shores, securing technology transfer that doesn't come with debt and building economic pathways that allow nations to choose their people over oil reserves."

Organisers had not set out to produce binding commitments, with the principal outputs being a scientific assessment of national transition pathways and a funding analysis produced by Global South finance specialists. A group of higher-ambition states called for a legally binding international instrument on fossil fuel phase-out, but other participating governments remained resistant, preferring a non-binding framework.

A follow-up conference is already planned in Tuvalu, in Polynesia, with organisers framing the process as the beginning of a standing intergovernmental forum on fossil fuel transition outside the UN framework.