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Cecilia Requena is a Bolivian senator with Parliamentarians for a Fossil Free Future and Juan Pablo Osornio is engagement and policy director at Earth Insight.

In late April, delegations from dozens of governments will gather in Colombia for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Together with the roadmaps announced at November’s UN climate summit in Brazil, which will call on countries to transition away from fossil fuels and halt deforestation by 2030, political will is building to save our most critical natural resources.

Now we need the practical application of where and how this will work – specific places where the line is drawn against new fossil fuel extraction. That is what Fossil Free Zones offer.

What is a Fossil Free Zone?

A Fossil Free Zone is a defined area demarcated by its ecological, biodiversity, or cultural significance, where exploration, extraction, and development of fossil fuels are permanently prohibited. Think tropical rainforests, key biodiversity areas, Indigenous Peoples’ territories, and critical marine ecosystems. They translate the abstract global commitment to transitioning away from fossil fuels into something tangible: a map, a boundary, a legal safeguard.

The stakes for getting this right are enormous. Research shows that oil and gas blocks already overlap with approximately 179 million hectares of tropical moist forests – roughly 21% of the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asian forest cover.

Globally, almost 27% of global conventional oil resources overlap with top-priority socio-environmental areas. In 2024 alone, 85% of new oil discoveries were made offshore, frequently overlapping with marine biodiversity hotspots.

Colombia: A model for the world

No country illustrates the possibilities better than Colombia – fittingly, the nation hosting this conference (along with the Netherlands). Last September, Colombia announced a landmark ban on fossil fuel and mining extraction across its entire Amazon region – the world’s first region-wide Fossil Free Zone of its kind.

Colombia’s decision followed in the wake of our new research, which found that developing untapped reserves beneath the country’s forest would generate billions of dollars in stranded assets while doing almost nothing for national energy security. It would, however, threaten 20% of the intact Amazon forest and the territories of nearly 70% of the Indigenous and local communities whose lands overlap with fossil fuel concessions. In most of the Colombian Amazon, the cost of extraction is higher than the cost of conservation. 

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Other countries are also taking steps in this direction. Mexico has 100 million hectares of similar Safeguard Zones, Guatemala ended oil extraction in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, and parliamentarians across the Amazon basin have introduced legislation to extend the ban region-wide.

The economic case for leaving fossil fuels in the ground

The fossil fuel endgame – a period of declining global demand as renewable energy scales – means that unconventional and frontier reserves in remote forests are increasingly uncompetitive. They require massive public investment in infrastructure, including roads that themselves become vectors for illegal logging, small-scale mining, and agricultural encroachment. Stranded asset risk is real and growing.

 In 2025, wind and solar growth outpaced all new electricity demand, and more than a quarter of all vehicles sold were electric.

For forested nations, there is also an emerging economic logic for protection: intact forests generate jobs and revenue from protected area management, watershed services, and sustainable tourism, while supporting the small-scale agriculture that most rural economies depend on. They also underpin water security for agriculture and energy generation and act as carbon sinks. Over 33 million people are employed directly in the forest sector, and there are more than 1.6 billion small forest farm producers. 

Fossil fuel investment amid volatile energy markets

Developing countries with fossil fuel reserves face genuine pressures to develop them – credit ratings, currency stability, social services, and energy security are tied to an ever-growing fossil frontier, particularly in the midst of volatile energy markets.

The conflict in Iran has amplified that volatility, spiking oil prices and giving fossil fuel-dependent governments renewed short-term pressure to expand domestic production – making the case for internationally-backed Fossil Free Zones, paired with real financial support, all the more urgent.

Innovative financial mechanisms like the Tropical Forest Forever Facility – a fund proposed at COP30 that would provide long-term, results-based payments to tropical forest nations to keep forests standing – can shift the economic scales enough to make Fossil Free Zones in high-integrity forests politically viable.

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Industries leading the energy transition – renewable energy developers, green hydrogen producers, sustainable finance institutions, and technology companies with net-zero supply chain commitments – also have a direct stake in the Fossil Free Zone agenda. Moreover, the reputational and legal risks of investments in fossil fuel frontiers are escalating.

Already, 11 banks have applied various levels of financial restrictions to the oil and gas sector in the Amazon. Some of these policies are strong, others are closer to greenwashing, but these commitments prove that banks see the increasing risks. 

What should emerge from Colombia conference

Our hope for the upcoming conference in Colombia is that, at a minimum, Fossil Free Zones are uplifted as part of a shared international vision for the energy transition. At best, a coalition of countries commits to include Fossil Free Zones in their national plans and establishes a shared framework with principles to identify new zones and implementation guidance for other countries.

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This is a practical on-ramp for countries that want to align with the global transition but need a concrete, geographically-defined starting point – and as a direct delivery mechanism for the deforestation roadmap, translating a global pledge to halt forest loss into specific action to thwart a real driver of deforestation.

The question is no longer whether fossil fuel extraction will end, but whether that end will be managed or chaotic, putting the planet’s most critical ecosystems in danger. Fossil Free Zones offer a hope of preventing irreversible harm to the forests, marine ecosystems, and Indigenous communities that represent humanity’s best remaining insurance against climate collapse – one territory at a time.

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Fossil Free Zones can be on-ramps to the clean energy transition