Fifty-seven nations gathered in Colombia for the first-ever summit dedicated solely to transitioning away from coal, oil and gas — and left with concrete roadmaps, a new science panel, and an agenda that reaches all the way to COP31.
Why Santa Marta Matters
The Caribbean city of Santa Marta in Colombia became the staging ground for what many observers have called a historic inflection point in global climate governance. From 24 to 29 April 2026, ministers, climate envoys, scientists, Indigenous communities and civil society representatives from 57 nations converged on the city for the first conference in the world dedicated exclusively to one subject: how to transition away from fossil fuels. No side negotiations, no sprawling agenda of competing interests — just one question on the table, with practical answers required.
The urgency was unmistakable. The conference took place against the backdrop of a global oil and gas crisis triggered by the Iran conflict, which disrupted energy supply chains across six continents, exposed the fragility of fossil-fuel-dependent economies, and ironically accelerated the case for clean-energy alternatives. Worsening extreme weather events and a strong El Niño further sharpened the scientific consensus that the window for action is narrowing rapidly.
The 57 participating nations collectively represent roughly one-third of the global economy. Notably, China, the United States, Russia and India were not invited. Co-hosts Colombia and the Netherlands deliberately restricted invitations to countries demonstrating genuine willingness to advance the transition, building on those who had pushed for a formal fossil-fuel roadmap at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in late 2025. This exclusionary approach attracted debate — some observers argued that the absence of the world’s largest emitters limits the summit’s real-world leverage — but most participants defended it as a necessary precondition for frank conversation.
Summit at a Glance
- Dates: 24–29 April 2026, Santa Marta, Colombia
- 57 participating nations — one-third of the global economy
- Co-hosts: Colombia and the Netherlands
- 400 scientists at the science pre-conference
- Next summit: Tuvalu 2027, co-hosted with Ireland
- Outcomes feed into COP31, Turkey, November 2026
Breaking From the UN Negotiation Mould
What made Santa Marta genuinely different was not just its singular focus, but its method. The two-day high-level segment, held on 28 and 29 April, dispensed with the standard format of UN climate negotiations — the lengthy plenary statements, the adversarial bloc politics, the interminable procedural disputes. Instead, ministers and climate envoys sat in small inner circles of twelve, with civil society and Indigenous representatives in an outer circle, for closed-door breakout sessions held under the Chatham House rule.
Conversations were described by participants as free-flowing, frank and emotionally direct. Computers were banned. Delegates spoke from memory and conscience. Panama’s special representative on climate change, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, captured the departure from convention memorably — he admitted to initial bewilderment at the format, only for it to completely reverse his expectations as ministers, civil society leaders and Indigenous people spoke candidly without scripted positions.
“For 34 years, we have negotiated the symptoms of the climate crisis and bulletproofed its cause. Thirty-four years of pledges. And where are we now? Fossil fuels are not just dirty. They are unreliable, they are dangerous and they must end.”
Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Special Representative on Climate Change, Panama
UK special representative for climate Rachel Kyte echoed the sentiment, praising the opportunity for sustained reflection: sitting in a small circle rather than racing through transactional negotiations allowed participants to genuinely think through the real barriers facing each nation. Colombian president Gustavo Petro delivered a powerful address calling fossil fuels a form of capital that could commit civilisational suicide, warning against resistance and inertia within existing economic power structures.
Colombian environment minister Irene Vélez Torres — herself a former academic — repeatedly emphasised that science must anchor political decisions and that governments must correct the growing gap between scientific consensus and policy action driven by economic and political lobbying.
Roadmaps, Workstreams & a New Science Panel
Three Workstreams for Concrete Action
The summit’s closing plenary on 29 April produced three formally announced workstreams that will define the agenda until the second summit in Tuvalu in 2027.
The first workstream centres on developing national and regional fossil-fuel transition roadmaps, aligned with countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, with support from the NDC Partnership. France notably announced its own roadmap during the opening plenary — the first national document of its kind. Critically, all participation is voluntary; no country is obligated to produce a roadmap, a compromise enabling broader buy-in at the cost of some ambition.
The second workstream focuses on reforming the financial system to make the transition viable, particularly for developing nations — identifying and eliminating harmful fossil-fuel subsidies, addressing debt traps that lock countries into continued fossil-fuel extraction, and improving access to climate finance. The International Institute for Sustainable Development will provide technical support.
The third workstream takes aim at the architecture of global trade itself, targeting fossil-fuel-intensive trade flows with the aim of advancing progress towards a fossil-fuel-free trade system. The OECD will support this workstream, which represents one of the more structurally ambitious reforms proposed — recognising that decarbonising production while maintaining carbon-intensive trade is a fundamental contradiction.
A New Science Panel
One of the summit’s most significant institutional innovations was the launch of a dedicated Science Panel for Global Energy Transition. Established by Dr Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Dr Carlos Nobre of the University of São Paulo, this panel is explicitly designed to overcome the limitations of the existing IPCC process.
Where IPCC reports operate on a seven-year cycle and require line-by-line governmental approval, this new panel will produce annual updates and deliver bespoke, nation-specific analyses on demand. It will involve 50 to 100 scientists globally, headquartered at the University of São Paulo, with four working groups addressing transition pathways, technology solutions, policy design and evaluation, and finance instruments.
The panel has three co-chairs: Dr Vera Songwe, economist and climate finance expert from Cameroon; Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, chief economist at the Potsdam Institute; and Professor Gilberto Jannuzzi, professor of energy systems at Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil. The academic pre-conference also produced a synthesis report with twelve action insights — including an explicit recommendation to halt all new fossil-fuel expansion and to classify fossil fuels as health-harming products subject to advertising restrictions.
Colombia’s Own Roadmap
The academic segment unveiled Colombia’s national fossil-fuel transition roadmap, drafted by a team led by Professor Piers Forster of the University of Leeds. The roadmap projects that Colombia can cut its energy-sector emissions to 90 percent below 2015 levels by 2050 through decarbonisation and transport electrification. While the transition requires upfront investment of approximately 10 billion dollars per year above business-as-usual, the analysis projects net economy-wide savings emerging by the 2040s, reaching 23 billion dollars annually by 2050.
The Voices Not Often Heard
A significant departure from standard international climate diplomacy was the formal and substantive inclusion of Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, women, youth and civil society — not as observers, but as participants in closed-door discussions alongside ministers. A People’s Assembly ran in parallel with governmental sessions, and a separate civil society People’s Summit involving 900 organisations also convened in Santa Marta, adopting a joint declaration that the energy transition must be rights-based, adequately funded, and must dismantle the systemic structures that created fossil-fuel dependency.
Road to COP31 and the Challenges Ahead
The Santa Marta outcomes are now formally destined for the Brazilian COP30 presidency, which is preparing a global fossil-fuel roadmap for COP31 in Turkey in November 2026. The summit becomes a critical building block for the first formal global architecture on fossil-fuel phasedown to emerge from the UN climate process.
Significant challenges remain. Over 130 countries were absent from Santa Marta — including the world’s three largest economies and three largest fossil-fuel producers. Voluntary workstream participation means ambition will be uneven. Yet the summit demonstrated something arguably more important than binding commitments: that a critical mass of nations can convene outside the adversarial architecture of UN negotiations, speak honestly about barriers, produce institutional innovations in real time, and generate outcomes that feed directly into formal multilateral processes.
As the second summit prepares to convene in Tuvalu — a country facing literal existential threat from sea-level rise — the momentum from Santa Marta will face its sternest test. Whether the open coalition envisioned by Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven can genuinely broaden to include the major emitters currently absent will determine whether Santa Marta 2026 is remembered as a turning point or merely a promising prelude.
– Sudhakar Garlanka
