Santa Marta, COLOMBIA — The first conference on ditching fossil fuels concluded on Wednesday evening in the port city to cheers and applause, with delegates hailing the five-day gathering as “historic” and unlike anything they’d experienced in years of stalled climate talks.

“This is the beginning of a new global climate democracy,” said Colombia’s minister for the environment and the green transition, Irene Vélez Torres, calling the conference she co-hosted a “breath of fresh air” and the only one that hasn’t caused her frustration.

Some 57 governments joined over 1,500 civil society members to grapple with how the world might actually end its dependence on the oil, gas and coal responsible for nearly 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. The discussions were held behind closed doors in small groups, a format delegates credited for enabling frank exchanges.

“This is the first time that we can open our hearts, open our brains, and have a real conversation without a stupid point of order or procedural process that derails the entire session, and then we’re left off with only 10 minutes to talk about substance,” Panama’s climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey told journalists, calling the consensus of UN climate talks “outdated”.

UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte conceded: “It’s a long time since I’ve been in a meeting on these subjects where, in the context of the climate negotiations, the mood is respectful and positive.”

Workstreams ahead

Colombia and the Netherlands announced three workstreams ahead. The first one will aim to help countries develop national roadmaps for an exit from fossil fuels, tied to national climate plans required by the Paris deal and with the support of the newly launched Science Panel on the Green Energy Transition – already nicknamed the “Spaghetti group” over its acronym, SPGET.

Few countries have such plans. France was the only one to present its roadmap, which stages the exit from coal, gas and oil between 2040 and 2050 – though the plan is not new. Vélez Torres called on countries to focus their roadmaps on the production dimension – a “blind spot” for existing agreements, she said.

A second workstream will examine the “macroeconomic dependencies and financial architecture” that are slowing down the transition, from crushing sovereign debt to fossil fuel subsidies. The International Institute for Sustainable Development has been tapped to lead this work.

The Dutch minister for climate policy and green growth, Stientje van Veldhoven, announced that countries would be sent a methodology to assess and disclose their fossil fuel subsidies, developed by a coalition on phasing out fossil fuel incentives her country helped launch along with Switzerland.

A third group, overseen by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, will focus on building a trade system free from fossil fuels. No new secretariat or organisation is planned to keep the process light.

A just transition

One of the central anxieties running through the conference was the risk of a green transition that would simply swap one extractive model for another as communities begin to bear the equally high costs of the race for critical minerals needed for solar panels, batteries and wind parks. “The transition to clean energy has to be on a human rights-based approach that does not evict peoples from their lands and territories and extract resources without limit,” Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, an Indigenous activist from the Mbororo pastoralist community in Chad, told Geneva Solutions.

But also, major producers have their own set of worries about abandoning their main source of revenue. “If we are doing a fossil fuel phase down, there must be a concerted, early planning, in such a way that it doesn’t affect the livelihood of people that are going to lose their jobs,” Nigeria’s chief consultant for the ministry of regional development, Chidi Magnus Onuoha, told Geneva Solutions. Van Veldhoven stressed that the focus was on ensuring an “orderly transition”.

Tuvalu to host next gathering

Now, the Santa Marta process will have to prove it can connect to formal multilateral diplomacy and its fraught reality. The immediate goal is to feed the outcomes into November’s Cop31 summit in Turkey, which will be attended by all UN member states, except perhaps for the US, which quit the body earlier this year. Fossil fuel heavyweights like Saudi Arabia, absent from Santa Marta, could push back.

Van Veldhoven said they were in talks with the co-hosts Ankara and Canberra on how to channel those outcomes. Belgium and Switzerland urged the countries convening to keep the “coalition open”. Speaking to Geneva Solutions, Felix Wertli, head of the Swiss delegation in Santa Marta, explained: “I believe that bringing in fossil fuel producing countries as well as importers can be beneficial to the process because we are not negotiating and we’re in an informal space, so that makes the exchange more easy.” He added: “There’s a number of countries, including from the G20, that could still join, so we should invite them.”

For Laura Mateus, a coordinator at the Swiss Catholic aid group Fastenaktion, the next major climate meeting in June, which will be held in Bonn, will tell whether the Santa Marta spirit survives UN dynamics.

Tuvalu and Ireland were named co-hosts of a second fossil fuel exit conference in the small Pacific island nation in 2027. Some had initially questioned whether Tuvalu had the capacity and infrastructure for such a meeting. Its minister of home affairs, climate change and environment, Maina Vakafua Talia, is convinced: “We will demonstrate to the world we’re not drowning. We’re surviving.”