Two years after governments agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, a series of conferences and consultations in 2026 will move the conversation on to how the transition should be carried out in a fair and orderly way, according to those leading key international processes.

On Thursday, Climate Home News hosted an event with former German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan, the Brazilian COP30 presidency’s chief strategy officer Tulio Andrade, Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative director Alex Rafalowicz and Natural Resource Governance Institute programme director Erica Westenberg.

The speakers discussed the first international conference on a just transition away from fossil fuels – taking place in the Colombian city of Santa Marta on April 28-29 – and the announcement at COP30 that the Brazilian presidency should consult on and draw up a global roadmap away from fossil fuels.

Morgan, Andrade and Rafalowicz said these were opportunities for many different political, economic and social groups – ranging from Indigenous Peoples and diplomats to those involved in finance and infrastructure – to get involved in designing the transition away from fossil fuels.

Andrade did not give details on the roadmap’s timeline, but said it would reflect that shifting off fossil fuels is not just a “climate imperative but actually something that is going to determine planning and stability from a much wider perspective that goes from financial stability, from social stability, from economic stability”.

He added that planning is needed to transition workers and to avoid disruption as the financial systems of fossil fuel-exporting countries are “still reliant on the legacy of petrodollars and the liquidity they gave”. Rafalowicz noted that price stability for consumers and access to energy for those without it are other important issues to address.

Morgan said governments could put the COP30 presidency’s promised roadmap on the official agenda for the mid-year climate talks in Bonn in June or at COP31 in November. She added that financial institutions and governments should draw up their own roadmaps for moving away from fossil fuels because “a roadmap is a course, it’s a process, it’s a multifaceted thing – it’s not just one single roadmap”.

Santa Marta conference

Rafalowicz, whose campaign group is supporting the Colombian and Dutch governments in organising the Santa Marta conference, said it would be a venue for participants to discuss the enabling conditions needed for phasing down fossil fuel production and use. The governments of Pacific island nations Tuvalu and Vanuatu have offered to hold a follow-up conference, he added.

Alongside the official conference, there will be events run by civil society around Santa Marta’s University of Magdalena, he said. The public university has a long history of exploring the challenge in question because the province of Magdalena is a major fossil fuel producer, he said. There’s also “a very strong local Indigenous population that has a lot of experience with both the harms of fossil fuel extraction, but also trying to manage the transition to the new economy”.

Rafalowicz added that the event’s organisers intend to produce a chair’s summary which can feed back into the official UN climate talks. At COP30, the Brazilian presidency officially welcomed the conference and Andrade told the webinar its conclusions should be “integrated” into COP discussions.

The Brazilian official said that a “Global Implementation Accelerator” (GIA) agreed at COP30 should aim for positive tipping points in climate action as “perhaps the only way” that governments can limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Currently scientists expect that limit to be breached on a long-term basis by the end of the decade but say temperatures can be brought back down below it again.

Andrade said the GIA could focus on high-impact measures that can serve as an “emergency brake” on global warming like cutting emissions of methane and non-carbon dioxide gases, ecosystem restoration, early warning for climate disasters and building state capacities.

High-carbon exports harm sovereignty

Speaking in Spanish on a separate webinar on Thursday, Colombia‘s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Irene Vélez Torres said her government is trying to replace industries that extract natural resources with productive industries based on “life”, like tourism.

She said Colombia’s strategy was “very different from Venezuela” and partly motivated by what she called Venezuela’s “mistake” in the 2000s of not acting to curb extractivism and dependence on fossil fuels.

“Part of the struggle for sovereignty in the south of the [American] continent has to do with overcoming extractivism,” she said. “We are more sovereign if we are less dependent on exports that are carbon-intensive.”

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Roadmaps and Colombia conference aim to shift fossil fuel transition into higher gear