A group of leading climate scientists has called on governments to develop roadmaps for phasing out fossil fuels “anchored in science and justice”, alongside the launch of a separate panel of experts that will give scientific advice on how to navigate the energy transition.

Unveiled on Friday in Santa Marta, Colombia, a set of a dozen policy recommendations, summarising the Santa Marta Academic Dialogue, is intended to feed into ministerial discussions on equitable ways to reduce dependence on coal, oil and gas during next week’s “First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels”.

The policy insights urge countries to create “whole-of-government” plans to “dismantle legal, financial and political barriers” to the energy transition.

Sixty countries head to Santa Marta to cement coalition for fossil fuel transition

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said the push for a global transition away from fossil fuels offers “a light in the tunnel” during a “very dark moment” of geopolitical conflict and climate extremes.

“Science is here to serve,” Rockström told a packed Santa Marta Theatre. “We’re today launching the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition (SPGET) as a service, as a global common good for all countries, all sectors, all regions to connect to the best science enabling a transition away from fossil fuels.”

Draft roadmap for Colombia

Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres said the new SPGET panel “addresses a longstanding shortcoming” in international climate science, by creating a scientific body dedicated solely to overcoming the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“It’s a first-of-its-kind, designed to organise in the next five years the scientific evidence that allows cities, regions, countries and coalitions to take the big leap,” Vélez told the event in Santa Marta.

As an example of how countries can move forward – even when their economies are closely tied to the production and use of dirty energy – a group of European scientists presented a draft roadmap to phase out fossil fuels in Colombia, with inputs from the Colombian government. It will be used as a basis for further consultation in the Latin American nation to define the way forward.

To phase out fossil fuels, developing countries need exit route from “debt trap”

Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds and co‑author of the roadmap, said it shows “a clear pathway to economic and societal benefit”, with average annual investment of $10.6 billion producing net economic benefits of $23 billion per year by 2050.

The document says fossil fuels in Colombia can be phased out through energy efficiency measures, coupling renewable generation with energy storage, and switching to electrified transport. But, it adds, the government will need to plan for reduced revenue from fossil fuel exports, which roughly half by the mid-2030s.

“What matters now is moving beyond headline targets to create credible, policy-relevant roadmaps, enabling a just and effective transition,” Forster said in a statement. Brazil is also working on a national roadmap for its own economy, as well as leading a voluntary process to produce a global roadmap.

IPCC hobbled by politics

Currently, the world’s top climate science body – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – requires countries to sign off on each “summary for policymakers” of its flagship science reports. This has led to a politically fraught process that has increasingly seen some oil-producing governments making efforts to weaken its recommendations.

In a bid to focus scientific debates on the phase-out of fossil fuels, the new SPGET was created based on a mandate from last year’s COP30. It is also meant to come up with scientific recommendations at a faster pace than the IPCC’s seven-year cycle.

Natalie Jones, senior policy advisor at the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD), called the new scientific panel “historic”, as it will be “more specific, more targeted and potentially more agile” with its advice on phasing out coal, oil and gas than the IPCC’s exhaustive scientific synthesis reports.

Why the transition beyond fossil fuels depends on cities and collective action

The panel will be co-chaired by Cameroonian economist Vera Songwe, PIK’s chief economist Ottmar Edenhofer and Gilberto M. Jannuzzi, professor of energy systems at Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas. It will be composed of between 50 and 100 scientists divided into four working groups: transition pathways, technological solutions, policies and finance.

Under the 12 insights for the Santa Marta process, the other group of scientists recommended banning new fossil fuel infrastructure, mandating “deep cuts” in methane emissions, implementing carbon levies on imports, and de-risking clean energy investments via interventions from central banks, among others.

Co-author Peter Newell, professor of international relations at the UK’s University of Sussex, said “there are many different challenges along the way – and not all of them have to do with lack of evidence”, but the phasing out of fossil fuels “is one part of the story and it’s important to address it”.

The original version of this story incorrectly reported that the new Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition had called on governments to develop roadmaps for phasing out fossil fuels “anchored in science and justice”. This appeal came from a separate group of scientists that worked on recommendations ahead of the Santa Marta conference. The article has now been amended.

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Forest destruction in the tropics eased by over a third in 2025, thanks in large part to Brazil’s stronger environmental protection which drove forest loss not caused by fires to a record low in the country, an annual survey showed.

In 2025, the world lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest – an area roughly the size of Denmark, according to data from the University of Maryland hosted on Global Forest Watch. That is 36% lower than in 2024 when climate-fuelled fires pushed forest disappearance to a record high.

Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute (WRI), said the drop was “encouraging” and proved what “decisive” government action can achieve. But she cautioned that part of the decline reflected “a lull” after an extreme fire year and forest destruction remains far too high to meet international goals to protect forests and limit global warming to acceptable levels.

Deforestation was 70% higher than it needed to be in 2025 to meet a global pledge to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030, which 145 countries first committed to at COP26 nearly five years ago, the report said. Brazil, which holds the COP30 presidency, has promised to deliver a global roadmap guiding countries toward that goal before this year’s UN climate summit.

“Achieving this goal in the coming years will not be easy as forests become more vulnerable to climate change and as humanity’s growing demand for food, fuel and material sourced from forests in the land they stand on continues to grow,” Goldman told journalists.

Agriculture, fires cause most losses

Primary tropical forests – such as the Amazon in Latin America, the Congo Basin and rainforests in Southeast Asia – are critical carbon sinks that help regulate the global climate by absorbing vast amounts of planet-heating CO2. Their loss weakens one of the world’s most important defences against planetary heating.

Agricultural expansion, driven both by industrial agribusinesses and shifting cultivation for subsistence, returned to being the leading cause of forest destruction in the tropics last year, the Global Forest Watch analysis found. After hitting a record high in 2024, fires – which are usually started by humans – still contributed to around a third of forest destruction in those critical regions.

Climate change is increasing fire risk in the tropics by creating hotter, drier conditions that allow blazes to spread more easily.

Lula’s policies drive progress in Brazil

Trends in global forest destruction are significantly influenced by what happens in Brazil, home to the world’s largest remaining rainforest. In 2025, the South American nation recorded a 42% fall in primary forest loss and its lowest-ever rate of forest loss caused by reasons other than fire.

Analysts said Brazil’s progress in tackling forest loss is a result of the stronger environmental protection and enforcement actions introduced since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to office in 2023, after years of budget cuts and policy rollbacks under his pro-business predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.

Lula’s administration revived the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm), an anti-deforestation framework that coordinates actions across federal agencies and promotes strengthened monitoring, commodities tracking and support for sustainable livelihoods.

The Brazilian government also beefed up the activities of the federal environmental agency Ibama, which between 2023 and 2025 issued 81% more infraction notices and 64% more fines than in the previous two-year period.

“Brazil’s progress shows what’s possible when forest protection is treated as a national priority,” said Mirela Sandrini, executive director of WRI Brasil, adding that the success is derived from building partnerships between the government, civil society, academia, local communities and the private sector.

Neighbouring Amazon country Bolivia recorded the second-highest amount of primary forest loss in the world last year, despite being home to a fraction of the forest held by other rainforest nations like Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Fires, likely started by humans, were the main cause of forest destruction in Bolivia, alongside the expansion of cattle ranching and crops such as soy and maize, the WRI analysis said.

Forest loss also remained high last year in countries including Peru, Laos and the DRC.

Malaysia and Indonesia showed stable and relatively low levels of forest loss compared to the highs reached in the mid-2010, although experts said Jakarta’s plans to massively expand food and energy production risk threatening the progress seen in the past decade.

Global policies and cash needed

Analysts said protecting the world’s remaining tropical forests will depend not only on national political leadership but also on global policy and financial developments.

Those include the creation of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a major new rainforest protection fund launched by Brazil at COP30. The mechanism, which gives financial rewards to countries that keep trees standing, has been billed as an historic opportunity to finance forest production. But it is far from raising the $125 billion of public and private investment needed for it to reach a meaningful scale and is unlikely to start making payments until 2028.

After failing to secure a negotiated agreement on forest protection at COP30, Brazil promised it would deliver this year a global roadmap charting a course to end deforestation by 2030.

The COP30 presidency said it has received 177 contributions from governments, UN agencies, business groups and civil society with suggestions on what the document should include.

What countries want in the roadmap

The Coalition of Rainforest Nations, which includes 50 countries, wants the roadmap to adopt a “global carbon budget” lens, mapping out region by region where CO2 emissions cuts are most urgent and where existing forest carbon stocks must be protected.

The negotiating bloc also wants finance, including from carbon markets, to be given a prominent space in the document, which will need to obtain broad support from governments to be effective. Without it, the roadmap “risks becoming yet another [plan] collecting dust on the shelves of posterity”, its submission said.

Colombia said interventions should focus on tackling the root causes of deforestation, pointing out that forest loss in the country is concentrated in regions afflicted by deep inequalities, high levels of poverty and the widespread presence of organised crime.

Indonesia wants the roadmap to function as a collaborative platform that “strengthens partnerships”, but warns that international initiatives should “avoid unilateral measures that may undermine trust and effective cooperation”, a thinly veiled rebuke of the European Union’s deforestation regulation.

In its submission, the United Kingdom said the roadmap should focus on a small number of “critical interventions” that can unlock the greatest progress, such as securing legal land rights for Indigenous communities, encouraging sustainable land use and introducing demand-side measures to promote deforestation-free products.

Meanwhile, Russia voiced its opposition to the creation of a “universal roadmap” to end deforestation, saying it instead wants to see a “dedicated dialogue” on forests where countries just exchange best practices.

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SYDNEY, Wednesday 29 April 2026 — In a major policy backflip, the Minns government has today announced it will reverse a more than decade-long ban on gas exploration in NSW, opening up huge new areas in Far West NSW for harmful gas drilling.

The decision comes in the midst of the ongoing energy crisis spurred by the illegal war on Iran and advice from the chief of the International Energy Agency that further investment in fossil fuels doesn’t make business or climate sense.

Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific said:

“It’s deeply unsettling to see the NSW government once again bending over backwards to please the gas lobby, who have been pushing aggressively to expand exploration under the cover of the illegal war on Iran. 

“This decision won’t solve any problems for Australians – in fact it will create them. Any new gas coming from the Far West would be more expensive than renewable energy and take decades to come online. It would also destroy the environment, cause enormous and irreversible climate damage, and delay the transition to what is irrefutably a cheaper, cleaner source of energy, renewables. 

“If the fossil fuel crisis driven by the illegal war on Iran has taught us anything, it is clear that we should be rapidly unhooking ourselves from volatile fossil fuels like gas, and that our politicians should be rapidly unhooking themselves from the gas lobby who consistently pollute their decision making. 

“We don’t have a gas supply problem here in Australia, we have an export problem. Instead of opening up more areas for drilling, the Federal Government should have the courage to make gas giants prioritise supply for domestic use instead of shipping away 80% of it – as proposed under the Gas Market Review.” 

-ENDS-

Media contact

Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lucy.keller@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace slams NSW government decision to reverse decade-long freeze on gas exploration