Something historic is happening right now in the coastal city of Santa Marta, Colombia, where more than 60 nations have gathered for the first international conference ever dedicated entirely to the question of how the world should phase out fossil fuels. The gathering, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, was born out of frustration with the United Nations climate process, where efforts to negotiate a concrete fossil fuel exit strategy have repeatedly stalled, and where COP30 in Brazil ended without nations being able to agree on even a direct mention of fossil fuels in the final deal. What makes the Santa Marta conference especially striking is who is in the room: not just climate-vulnerable small island nations, but major fossil fuel producers including Colombia itself, Canada, Australia, Norway, Nigeria, Angola, Mexico, and Brazil, representing together about one-fifth of global fossil fuel production and nearly one-third of global consumption. Colombia’s Environment Minister called the assembled countries a new power in global climate diplomacy.
Organizers say the timing is not coincidental. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has created what the International Energy Agency has called the biggest oil supply shock ever, and many of the countries now gathered in Santa Marta say the crisis has made the urgency of reducing fossil fuel dependence impossible to ignore or delay further. The conference is not expected to produce binding commitments, but its recommendations will feed into a voluntary global roadmap being led by Brazil and into future negotiations at COP31. For small island nations like Vanuatu and Tuvalu, whose very existence is threatened by rising seas, the gathering represents exactly the kind of direct, honest conversation that the larger UN process has failed to deliver, and their ministers arrived in Santa Marta describing it as long overdue.
