After COP28 finally acknowledged the need to transition away from fossil fuels, Santa Marta tried to turn that promise into something more concrete. Journalist Seden Anlar explores whether its phaseout momentum can survive the road to COP31 and the forums where fossil-fuelled power still shapes the rules.

For more than three decades, UN climate summits have circled around the same very obvious problem.

Science has said it. Island states have said it. Climate activists have said it on banners, in chants, in press conferences and, eventually, in exhaustion.

Fossil fuels are driving the climate crisis.

And yet inside the negotiating rooms, coal, oil and gas have often been treated like the elephant in the room: the thing everyone knows, but not everyone is willing to say too clearly. Especially over the past few Conferences of Parties (COPs), governments have spoken at length about emissions, temperature limits, ambition, finance, net zero and keeping 1.5°C alive – while the fight over fossil fuels itself was often reduced to verbs, commas and the difference between ‘phase down’ and ‘phase out’.

That changed, at least on paper, at COP28 in Dubai, when governments agreed for the first time to ’transition away from fossil fuels’ in energy systems. But the wording still left almost everything unresolved: no timeline, no roadmap, no mechanism and enough ambiguity for false solutions to be dressed up as remedies.

After decades of climate diplomacy, the world had finally moved from ‘fossil fuels are the problem’ to ‘fossil fuels should eventually go’. The harder question was how to turn that sentence into a planned, financed and fair transition.

Santa Marta’s smaller room

That is why representatives from 57 countries, alongside scientists, civil society groups and other stakeholders, came together in Santa Marta, Colombia in April 2026, and said, in effect: enough pretending that vague COP language can handle this.

So the conference was not another COP, nor was it designed to produce a universal agreement with every major polluter, producer and blocker in the room. Perhaps that was the point. The co-hosts invited a select group of countries they believed were willing to engage, leaving out others, including the United States, Russia, India and China.

That made the room smaller, but the conversation more direct. Santa Marta did not need consensus from every country as consensus is often where fossil fuel language goes to be softened, delayed or quietly buried. Instead of fighting over whether fossil fuels could be named at all, participants could talk about roadmaps, subsidies, debt, trade, production, demand reduction and the financial systems that keep countries tied to coal, oil and gas.

The format was different too. Scientists met before the ministerial sessions. A People’s Assembly brought Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, farmers, trade union representatives, women’s rights activists, children and other civil society groups into the process. Ministers, envoys and stakeholders also joined breakout sessions on planned fossil fuel decline and financial gaps. For a process usually dominated by cautious language, closed rooms, procedural ambushes, protest crackdowns and science treated as background noise, Santa Marta did things differently.

The result was not a binding fossil fuel phaseout agreement. No country left legally required to end fossil fuel production. There was no global end date for coal, oil or gas.

But Santa Marta did begin to build some of the machinery a planned transition would require: a Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition, workstreams on transition roadmaps, macroeconomic dependence and fossil fuel–free trade systems, and a second summit in Tuvalu in 2027, to be co-hosted by Ireland.

More importantly, it moved the fossil fuel debate somewhere more concrete. If governments were serious about transitioning away from fossil fuels, then the question was no longer whether they could agree to say so. It was what would actually make that transition possible: finance, governance and planning.

Finance, because countries cannot simply be told to leave resources in the ground while replacing public revenues, protecting workers and building clean alternatives on their own. Governance, because supporters of the Fossil Fuel Treaty argue that phaseout needs a legal framework, not scattered national pledges and voluntary promises. And planning, because ‘transitioning away’ means little unless it becomes timelines, sectors, fuel-by-fuel targets and policies governments can actually be judged against.

France became one example of that. It used Santa Marta to put a roadmap on the table – an interesting move after the EU failed to secure the stronger fossil fuel roadmap language it had pushed for in the COP process. France’s plan aims to cut the fossil fuel share of final energy consumption from around 60% in 2023 to 40% by 2030 and 30% by 2035, on the way to carbon neutrality in 2050. It also sets fuel-by-fuel targets: phasing out coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas by 2050.

In that sense, France’s roadmap did one of the things Santa Marta was trying to do. It moved beyond another sentence about ‘transitioning away’ and put forward a national pathway with dates, sectors and delivery questions attached.

But the real test was never only going to be whether countries could present roadmaps in Santa Marta. It was whether that direct fossil fuel conversation could travel beyond Santa Marta into forums still shaped by major emitters, fossil fuel producers and fossil fuel–dependent economies.

That question emerged almost immediately. And it emerged, awkwardly, via France.

France’s phaseout paradox

In Santa Marta, France had presented fossil fuel phaseout as something that could be planned: a matter of dates, sectors, delivery and national strategy. But under its 2026 G7 presidency, it made a very different calculation.

At the G7 environment ministers’ meeting in Paris, France chose not to put climate change directly on the formal agenda in order to avoid a confrontation with the United States.

That contradiction goes to the heart of the problem Santa Marta was supposed to address. France had framed phaseout in terms governments usually like – energy security, economic resilience, sovereignty and industrial policy. But when climate itself became politically inconvenient, even that language had its limits.

Santa Marta showed that fossil fuels can be discussed directly when the room is built for that purpose. The G7 showed how quickly that directness can collapse when the conversation moves back into forums where the richest and most fossil-fuelled economies still get to decide what can and cannot be said.

Bonn then showed something similar inside the formal United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process: the fossil fuel question had entered the room, but the fight over whether it could be named, governed and translated into roadmaps was still very much alive.

Bonn again

The Bonn Climate Change Conference, known as SB64, was the first major UNFCCC negotiating moment after Santa Marta and before COP31, which proved difficult almost immediately. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the EU and the UK pushed to keep the transition away from fossil fuels visible, while the Arab Group, Like-Minded Developing Countries and Russia resisted singling out coal, oil and gas. The familiar fault line was still there: climate-vulnerable states and countries pushing for a clearer fossil fuel phaseout wanted fossil fuels named directly; fossil fuel producers and fossil fuel–dependent blocs preferred broader language about emissions, finance and national circumstances.

One focus of that fight was the fossil fuel roadmap launched by Brazil’s COP30 presidency after last year’s summit in Belém. The roadmap is not a negotiated UN agreement, but a presidency-led process meant to keep the transition away from fossil fuels on the table. Several European and island states argued in Bonn that it should not become a one-off report, while civil society groups pushed for it to become a real tool for accountability, finance and just transition – not another document that politely acknowledges the problem before disappearing into the COP archive.

Bonn did not resolve the fight. But it did carry the Santa Marta question into the UNFCCC bloodstream. Next in the UNFCCC process, at COP31, that question will sit inside a broader debate over what implementation actually means.

The electrical COP-out

The summit will take place in Antalya, Türkiye, in November, with an unusual arrangement: Türkiye will host, while Australia’s Chris Bowen will lead the formal negotiations. COP31 is already being pitched as a COP of implementation, with an agenda built around electrification, buildings, waste, methane reduction, resilient cities and climate finance, including a voluntary proposed goal to raise the share of final energy demand met by electricity to 35% by 2035.

That electrification target is important. If more cars, homes, heating systems and industrial processes run on electricity – and if that electricity increasingly comes from renewables – fossil fuel demand can fall. It is one of the clearest ways to make the transition tangible.

But cutting demand for fossil fuels is not the same as planning their decline.

That is the gap Santa Marta tried to expose. A country can support electrification while still expanding coal, oil and gas production. A summit can talk about clean energy deployment while avoiding the harder questions of when fossil fuel production stops growing, how decline is managed and who pays for it.

Australia is a good example of that contradiction. Bowen has argued that Australia must prepare for a world in which fossil fuel exports become harder, and shift toward exporting clean energy products instead. But Australia remains one of the world’s major coal and gas exporters. According to Climate Council, since 2022 its government has approved more than 30 new, expanded or extended fossil fuel developments.

That is where the significance of Santa Marta either matters or fades. If its roadmap push keeps moving into the formal process, COP31 could become more than a clean energy summit. It could become a place where implementation starts to mean not only scaling up alternatives, but managing the decline of fossil fuels themselves.

If not, fossil fuel phaseout risks remaining what it has so often been in climate diplomacy: acknowledged in principle, resisted in language and delayed in practice.

The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.