First-Ever Fossil Fuel Phase-Out Conference

The Colombia-Netherlands conference opening April 24 is the most direct diplomatic challenge yet to the UN climate consensus model, but Mexico, simultaneously pursuing fracking and renewable targets, embodies the contradictions the summit is designed to resolve.

For three decades, global climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have circled around fossil fuels without naming them. That began to change tentatively at COP28 in Dubai in 2023, when nearly 200 countries agreed for the first time to "transition away from fossil fuels." 

Then it partly unraveled at COP29 in Azerbaijan, where governments failed to even reaffirm that commitment. At COP30 in Belém last November, frustration finally produced a structural rupture: a coalition of 24 countries signed a declaration calling for a dedicated diplomatic process outside the UN framework, and Colombia and the Netherlands announced they would co-host the first international conference on fossil fuel phase-out.

That conference is now underway. Delegates from more than 50 countries are gathering in Santa Marta, Colombia, from April 24 to 29 at the first-ever Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Unlike formal UN climate negotiations, the conference is a smaller gathering with no official negotiations and no binding commitments, its main output will be a co-host report structured around three pillars, designed to lay the groundwork for a second conference in Tuvalu and, ultimately, formal treaty negotiations.

Why Outside the UN, and Why Now

For decades, climate negotiations focused on managing the symptoms of the climate crisis ,greenhouse gas emissions, while ignoring its root cause: the unchecked proliferation of coal, oil, and gas. The UNFCCC's consensus-based structure allows any single country to block progress, and fossil fuel producers have used that mechanism systematically to stall language on production phaseouts.

At COP30, more than 80 countries backed a formal roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, but major producers blocked any reference to such a roadmap in the final declaration. The final text placed "fossil fuels" in a side annex rather than the main declaration, a result that one negotiator described as feeling "on a knife-edge."

The Santa Marta conference draws on a model that has worked before: the Ottawa Conference led to the Mine Ban Treaty on landmines; a series of Humanitarian Initiative conferences created the political backing for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The same approach, a coalition of willing countries bypassing consensus to forge binding norms, is now being applied to fossil fuels.

The attendance list reflects the asymmetries of global energy politics with unusual clarity. The group headed to Santa Marta includes COP31 hosts Australia and Türkiye, as well as European, Latin American, Asian, African, and Pacific nations. Major fossil fuel producers such as Canada, Norway, Brazil, and Nigeria are present, signaling their willingness to engage with the transition debate in all its complexity. The United States, China, India, and Russia will not attend.

The absence of the world's three largest emitters, the United States, China, and India, and the largest producer not attending (Russia) sets an immediate ceiling on the summit's potential to accelerate a globally coordinated phaseout. Colombia's Environment Minister Irene Vélez has stressed that the conference is not intended to replace the COP process but to complement and potentially revive it, describing it as a "coalition of the willing" showing hesitant nations that a critical mass is shifting toward renewables.

Mexico's Paradoxical Position

Mexico's relationship to this moment is layered with nuance. The country's updated Nationally Determined Contribution, presented at COP30, commits to cuts of up to 404 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent by 2035. President Claudia Sheinbaum came to office with strong climate credentials,a doctorate in energy engineering, a pre-presidential career anchored in sustainable urban policy. 

And yet, in the same weeks that the Santa Marta conference is convening, her government is establishing a scientific committee to evaluate fracking as a path toward domestic gas production, actively promoting a combined-cycle gas plant pipeline that will account for the majority of new generation capacity through 2027, and extending diesel price subsidies financed through IEPS reductions worth billions of pesos.

Mexico's 2026 federal budget allocated US$28.2 billion to PEMEX, nearly 5% of total public spending, while SEMARNAT received just US$103 million, a 4% real decline. Only 1.4% of SENER's budget, equivalent to US$94.3 million, was directed toward clean energy, with 98.6% going to hydrocarbons.

Mexico is not among the signatories of the Belém Declaration that convened Santa Marta, nor is it among the 18 states formally backing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. That places it in the same structural position as many Global South economies whose energy policy is simultaneously driven by climate ambition and supply security imperatives, a tension the Santa Marta conference explicitly acknowledges. 

The first pillar of the conference's agenda focuses on overcoming economic dependence on fossil fuels, recognizing that many countries, including Colombia itself, rely on oil and gas revenues to fund essential social programs, and that asking them to phase out those revenues without transition finance or debt relief is politically and economically untenable.

The outcome that conference organizers consider the minimum threshold for success is an official acknowledgment, in the co-host report, of the need to negotiate a new international treaty governing fossil fuel production, and a mandate to convene a second conference in Tuvalu within a year where formal negotiating authority could be established. 

Whether that threshold is met, and whether Mexico eventually joins the coalition that emerges, will depend on how quickly the energy security arithmetic that is currently driving Mexico's gas strategy shifts toward a calculus where domestic renewables and storage offer a more credible alternative