Leaders of the Santa Marta coalition – a group of governments, businesses and civil society organisations seeking to transition away from fossil fuels – hope it can withstand the loss of one of its founding members as a far-right, pro-fossil fuel government takes office in Colombia this week.
In April, Colombia hosted 57 governments in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta for the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels – a voluntary meeting outside of official UN climate talks. In June, far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won a general election, and is set to take office on Friday.
De la Espriella has pledged to ramp up coal exports and begin fracking for methane gas, reversing a ban on all new hydrocarbon exploration enacted by the current government of Gustavo Petro since 2022. The soon to be environment minister Fabio Arjona said the Santa Marta conference was an “absolute waste of time and money”.
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He will replace Irene Vélez Torres, who co-chairs the Santa Marta coalition. Torres told a press briefing last week that the initiative was created in a way that made sure “it could live without Colombia because we knew [a change in government] was a risk”.
“It’s a coalition of countries but also subnational governments, civil society, scientists… so there is a lot more than just Colombia. It’s a shame that Colombia cannot continue with its international leadership, but it doesn’t mean that what we created as a global legacy will not continue,” she said.
Dutch environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, also a co-chair in the initiative, told Climate Home News in a statement that “the organization is set-up in a way that progress does not depend on one or two countries”, and highlighted the role of incoming co-chairs Ireland and Tuvalu.
The new co-chairs will officially take the lead after COP31 and are set to host the second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Tuvalu next year. Van Veldhoven said the two countries are already involved in preparing for this transition.
Priorities: roadmaps, debt and trade
After meeting in Santa Marta to kickstart work on phasing out fossil fuels, governments agreed to focus on three priorities: developing national roadmaps to phase out fossil fuels, decoupling trade from coal, oil and gas, and reducing global finance’s dependence on fossil fuels.
At last year’s COP30, a group of around 80 countries led a failed push for the UN to adopt a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. To keep talks from collapsing, Brazil proposed to draft a voluntary roadmap instead, which has received suggestions from dozens of countries.
In June, Vélez Torres told journalists that Colombia and the Netherlands would seek for COP31 to reflect the work of the Santa Marta coalition, something the co-presidency of Türkiye and Australia was “open” to consider, she added.
Last week, she stressed that the workstreams are also set up independently from the Dutch and Colombian governments, and that each area of focus will have its own “madrina”, which translates as “godmother”, a contact point that will oversee progress and support countries.
Van Veldhoven noted that, while the coalition is open to new members, the current priority is “setting up the organisation with the current involved countries and stakeholders”. The Dutch government noted that “several countries” have expressed interest, but could not disclosed which ones.
Colombia’s fossil fuel shift
While the coalition is set up to withstand changes in government, Colombia’s shift to a pro-fossil fuel government represents an important blow to global initiatives seeking to phase out fossil fuels, said Andreas Malm, author and professor of human ecology at Lund University.
“The gap that we have after this defeat is charismatic political leadership that makes the necessary links and arguments on the global stage. For the moment, I don’t see who could replace Colombia in that role,” he said. “But who knows… perhaps some miracle will happen somewhere in the world and you will have someone to pick up that mantle that is now on the ground.”
Colombia not only leads the Santa Marta coalition, but is also one of the few fossil fuel producers in the group to actually halt new exploration licenses. Coal and oil derivatives account for about a third of the country’s exports, but both industries have followed a downward trend over the last decade.
De la Espriella’s government will also have to start from scratch, as Petro’s government halted all oil and gas exploration pilots in the key Magdalena and Cesar-Ranchería regions. Both areas are also home to indigenous communities who are likely to challenge any projects in court.
Vélez Torres said that halting all new coal, oil and gas exploration licenses “was not easy” and led to “violent reactions” from national elites, including “violent threats”, but that it came with the deep belief that “it is needed, it is urgent, and it cannot be delayed”.
At an international level, she added that more countries need to show “political bravery” to take similar decisions, and that the global discussion to phase out fossil fuels “cannot be delayed” because the time window for humanity to act is shrinking.
“We decided to go against the current. That has been one of the bravest decisions, and I hope that other governments and particularly civil society can get to lead that conversation forward”, she said.
The post Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.
Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.