Against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical friction and volatile global energy markets, approximately 50 national governments are set to convene this week in Santa Marta, Colombia’s sunlit Caribbean coastal city, for a high-stakes summit focused on accelerating the global transition away from polluting fossil fuels. Running from April 24 to 29, the conference is co-hosted by the Colombian and Dutch governments, and will bring together a diverse cohort of participants: national cabinet ministers, regional and local government leaders, academic researchers, and civil society advocates. All attendees will center their discussions on how to wind down production and use of oil, gas, and coal while ensuring the global energy transition proceeds along a just, orderly, and equitable path, according to summit organizers.
This gathering emerges from growing frustration among climate-conscious governments and grassroots advocates that decades of formal United Nations climate negotiations have failed to directly confront fossil fuel production, the single largest driver of anthropogenic global warming. The Santa Marta summit was organized to advance this critical conversation outside the slow-moving framework of official multilateral talks.
Unlike binding formal UN climate agreements, the summit is not designed to deliver enforceable international commitments. Instead, organizers frame the gathering as a long-overdue space to open debate on a politically charged issue that has been sidelined in traditional climate negotiations for decades. “This is fundamentally a political space. We are opening a forum for discussion that simply does not exist in existing climate processes,” Colombia’s Minister of Environment Irene Vélez Torres told the Associated Press in a pre-summit interview. The core goal, officials say, is to draft a shared set of actionable policy proposals and build a broad coalition of nations willing to move faster than current international commitments to phase out fossil fuels.
Claudio Angelo, head of international policy at Brazil’s Observatorio do Clima think tank, notes that climate action has unfortunately slipped down the list of urgent priorities for many governments in recent years, amid competing global crises. Attendees will include major fossil fuel producing and consuming nations from across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Notably, two of the world’s largest oil producers, the United States and Saudi Arabia, will not participate, a reality that underscores deep global divisions between nations pushing for an accelerated transition and economies deeply tied to fossil fuel extraction and export revenues.
Under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, member nations set their own voluntary national emissions reduction targets, with no enforceable international mechanism to compel countries to phase out fossil fuel production. The Santa Marta summit is part of a broader global push to shift climate diplomacy beyond incremental emissions target-setting and toward direct action to curb fossil fuel output, an issue that has split the international community for decades along political and economic lines. Climate advocates argue that new, bolder approaches are needed to close what they see as a dangerous gap in global climate governance.
A key proposal expected to dominate summit discussions is the creation of “fossil-free zones”: designated geographic areas where all new oil, gas, and coal extraction is permanently banned, with a focus on ecologically sensitive and biodiversity-rich regions. “Fossil-free zones turn global, abstract climate goals into concrete, on-the-ground decisions,” explained Andrés Gómez of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative. Indigenous leaders, who have been central to shaping the summit agenda, are pushing attending governments to enshrine fossil-free zones as a core component of national energy transition plans.
“For Indigenous peoples, halting fossil fuel extraction is not only an existential climate imperative — it is essential to defending our ancestral territories, our self-governance systems, and our fundamental right to self-determination,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, a coalition of Indigenous and local community groups representing millions of people across the world’s forest regions. Jintiach added that governments must move “from empty commitments to on-the-ground implementation” by embedding fossil-free zone policies into official national energy transition roadmaps. Analysis from environmental advocacy groups shows that existing oil and gas extraction concessions already overlap with millions of hectares of intact tropical forest and Indigenous-held territories, highlighting the massive scale of the challenge facing reformers.
The summit convenes at a moment of unprecedented global geopolitical uncertainty, including ongoing conflict in the Middle East that has disrupted global energy markets and threatened supply flows through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply transits. The resulting energy price spikes have rippled far beyond energy markets, hitting household budgets worldwide. “Oil price volatility does not stay confined to energy trading floors — it moves straight into the daily lives of ordinary people,” said Mary Robinson, former Irish president and leading climate justice advocate who will attend the summit, during a pre-summit press briefing. “As always, the impacts hit the most vulnerable communities hardest, while big oil companies rake in record windfall profits,” she added.
Vélez argues that current global energy instability should speed up, rather than delay, the transition away from fossil fuels. “This crisis — and let’s call it what it is: the war in the Middle East has triggered a global crisis — in this context, I believe the global movement must double down on radicalizing the green agenda and accelerating the energy transition,” she said. Some energy analysts, however, warn that short-term energy supply shocks could push many nations to ramp up domestic fossil fuel production in the near term, even as they reaffirm long-term climate commitments. This dynamic highlights the persistent tension between national energy security goals and urgent climate action.
This tension is particularly acute in Latin America, where many national economies remain heavily dependent on oil, gas, and mining exports even as regional governments position themselves as global climate leaders. Colombia, one of Latin America’s top oil producers and home to roughly 6% of the world’s remaining Amazon rainforest, relies on crude exports for a large share of both government revenue and foreign exchange earnings. Despite this dependence, Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s administration has pledged to halt all new oil exploration and lead global calls for a coordinated phaseout of fossil fuels. “Economic and fiscal dependence on fossil fuels is a problem, and it is perhaps the single biggest challenge we face as we push for this transition,” Vélez acknowledged.
Financial constraints will also be a central topic of summit discussions. Many low- and middle-income developing nations carry high levels of public debt and have limited fiscal space, making large-scale investments in renewable energy infrastructure and just transition programs difficult to achieve. Civil society groups argue that without fundamental reforms to the global financial system, these constraints will continue to slow progress away from fossil fuels.
“Moving away from fossil fuels unquestionably requires a carefully planned economic and energy transition that accounts for national fiscal realities,” said Carola Mejía of the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Economic, Social and Climate Justice. Gabriella Bianchini, policy advisor for advocacy group Global Witness, says the stakes of the summit extend far beyond climate action alone. “As communities across the globe suffer the consequences of oil-driven conflict, it has never been clearer that the world needs to leave the fossil fuel era behind,” Bianchini said. “Santa Marta is a chance for governments and communities to grab the bull by the horns and take concrete action toward building a greener, more equitable, and more peaceful world.”
Bianchini added that while formal UN climate talks remain a critical part of global climate governance, they have repeatedly failed to deliver meaningful progress on curbing fossil fuel production. “Santa Marta represents a space for governments to advance the only plan we know will stave off the worst impacts of climate breakdown: a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels,” she said. Observers note that the core test of the summit will be whether it can send a clear, unified political signal on an issue that has remained unresolved after decades of global climate talks. For Vélez, the gathering represents a potential turning point for global climate action. “If we step back, this conference is that turning point where, collectively, we decide to stand on the right side of history,” she said.
