After the disappointment at the United Nations climate summit in Brazil in November 2025 that failed to establish an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels, a conference in Colombia from April 24 to 29 has brought the hope that the world community will take decisive steps towards transitioning to green fuels.

While over 50 countries gather in the port city of Santa Marta in Colombia for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, India is not listed among the participants. Questions to the organisers about whether India had been invited did not receive a response.

“Countries willing to engage constructively in a complicated and divisive topic and fossil fuel producing countries were invited,” said Bastiaan Hassing, Head of Unit, International Climate Policy, Netherlands government, at a recent pre-conference briefing hosted by the global coalition, Covering Climate Now. “We are looking at regional representation and we are on course to get that.”

The conference is envisaged as being complementary to the United Nations Climate talks. It is not a negotiating platform but instead aims at action and implementation to phase out fossil fuels.

A commitment to host the conference was made at the Belem United Nations climate summit, when Colombia’s Minister of Environment, Irene Vélez Torres, presented the Belém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels to consolidate an international alliance of nearly 85 countries to phase out oil, coal, and gas.

While the eventual text of the Belem declaration agreed to by participants did not have the phrase “fossil fuel”, Colombia and The Netherlands have partnered to host the Santa Marta conference.

Participants include Germany, the UK, Finland, Australia, Canada, Italy, Turkey, France, Spain, Vietnam, the Scandinavian countries, the Pacific nations and African and Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Even petroleum and oil producers such as Nigeria will attend.

The 85 countries that support a fossil fuel phase-out represent the world’s biggest economies. Even though US President Donald Trump pulled out of the United Nations climate regime in January, a group of city and state governments that support the goal formed a coalition called “We are still in.”

More than 55 US counties, states and universities representing 75% of the US GDP have expressed support for the conference, according to Mark Hertsgaard of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism coalition, at the preconference briefing.

In addition, non-governmental organisations, parliamentarians and political leaders, academics, members from the private sector, communities indigenous peoples, youth, women, social movements, small holder farmers, trade unions will also take part.

The world is already living in what the journal Nature Climate Change describes as the “overshoot age”. At a United Nations conference in Paris in 2015, countries agreed to limit carbon emissions so that the temperature of the earth would be kept under 2 °C relative to the pre-industrial era. Recent research shows that the temperature increase may already have overshot the 1.5 °C threshold that signatories of the Paris Agreement aimed to achieve.

The Santa Marta conference will be attended by a “coalition of the willing” – countries that will share plans to transition their economics away from oil, gas and coal without hurting workers and communities, Kyle Pope and Mark Hertsgaard, wrote in The Guardian, They are founders of Covering Climate Now.

Action and implementation will be the main focus and also plans to phase out the $7 trillion annual subsidies on fossil fuels, they said,

Hertsgaard said this conference could be a game changer as it will not be governed by United Nations rules, so petro states that have used their powerful veto to oppose a roadmap to phasing out fossil fuels will not be able to undermine progress.

Already wars in Ukraine and West Asia are being described as climate wars due to the spike in carbon emissions they have caused.

India is experiencing the impacts of reduced petroleum supplies as a result of the West Asia conflict. Delphine Lévi Alvarès, Global Petrochemicals Campaign Manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, in a phone interview, said that Santa Marta responds to the limitations of the United Nations process.

After nearly 30 United Nations climate summits, a clear pathway to a fossil-free future remains elusive – making Santa Marta a necessary, complementary and cooperative space for willing countries to chart that path, she said. The United Nations climate summits have been debating how to address the symptoms of the problem – emissions. But the governments that will gather in Santa Marta will focus on tackling the root causes of the climate crisis – how to transition away from fossil fuel production and dependence.

The discussion about transitioning away from fossil fuels is very timely, she said. The recent war has demonstrated why it is essential to decouple the food production system from fossil fuel since petroleum is a key raw material for some fertilisers.

The conference will also discuss the growth of the petrochemicals sector and oil extraction and the need for a “just transition” that in the shift to a low-carbon economy protects workers and communities dependent on fossil fuels.

The commitment of Colombia, a major coal producer, to transition away from fossil fuels is evident in hosting the conference, said Daniela Duran of Colombia’s environment ministry.

“We are seeing the fluctuations of fossil fuel dependency in the current context, both from the producer and consumer perspective and the conference was birthed as a response to this crisis and have an honest conversation about how to make the transition viable and equitable and make economic stability a priority,” she said.

More than 600 written submissions proposing solutions have been received, she said. “We are not starting from scratch but these are the enablers and solutions we need to put in place and coordinate the action,” Duran said.

The world needs to coordinate its actions to implement the phaseout in an equitable way and big producers of coal gas and oil will be key to ensuring that this transition is viable, Duran said.

“The key word is implementation and we need to move forward from the discussion to implementation phase and we have come together after a substantive process to implement the transitioning process,” she said.

Meanwhile, on April 15, some Pacific nations launched what they labelled the Tassiriki Call for a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific. According to a press statement, a central demand of the call is the urgent negotiation and adoption of a global Fossil Fuel Treaty – a binding international mechanism to manage a just, orderly, equitable, and rapid phase-out of coal, oil and gas.

Meena Menon is a freelance journalist, author and researcher.