Around 60 governments, among them Brazil, Germany, Canada and Nigeria, will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia, beginning Tuesday for the first international meeting explicitly aimed at phasing out fossil fuels, officials said. The session is designed to focus on actionable measures to shift economies off oil and gas rather than to set new global targets of the kind typically negotiated at U.N. climate summits.
Organisers said the meeting will bring ministers and officials together to exchange experience on concrete policy instruments. "We’re not negotiating ambitions, we’re not negotiating commitments. This really is about sharing how you do this," said Stientje van Veldhoven, the Netherlands climate minister, whose government is co-organising the event with Colombia.
Delegates are expected to concentrate on the practical levers needed to trigger a phase-out: the kinds of financial instruments that can mobilise capital, regulatory incentives to accelerate change, and planning tools that can sequence the transition, van Veldhoven said. Talks will also examine how to create investment conditions that allow industries to move from gas to electricity and how to reform fossil fuel subsidies.
The convening is intended as a coalition of willing nations prepared to share operational experience. Notably absent are the world’s two largest emitters, China and the United States. Saudi Arabia and other major oil and gas producers in the Middle East are also not attending.
Organisers and participants have cited the current conflict in Iran as a reminder of how exposed many countries remain to disruptions in oil and gas supplies. The Iran war has unsettled global oil and gas markets and pushed prices sharply higher, officials said. Asian economies have experienced fuel shortages, while European countries have faced sharply rising energy costs.
Van Veldhoven described the energy crisis as strengthening the rationale for a managed exit from oil and gas on grounds of economic and energy security in addition to climate objectives. "This war in the Middle East has ramifications all around the world because of our dependency on fossil fuels," she said. "The less you are dependent on it, the less vulnerable you are."
Participants also see the meeting as an expression of impatience with the pace of annual U.N. climate negotiations, where nearly 200 countries must reach consensus for decisions. Countries committed at the COP28 summit in 2023 to transition away from fossil fuels, but subsequent COP sessions have achieved limited progress in implementing that pledge. Delegates have pointed to examples of obstruction: countries including Saudi Arabia have blocked recent proposals targeting fossil fuels.
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas remain the primary driver of climate change, and organisers say the Santa Marta meeting is aimed at moving from high-level commitments to the operational steps that can produce results on the ground.
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