Around 60 governments are due to gather in the Colombian city of Santa Marta this week for what is being billed as the first global summit on phasing out coal, oil and gas, where experts say new coalitions could help speed up the energy transition beyond the slower pace of UN climate talks.
At last year’s COP30 UN conference, a group of some 80 countries backed the idea of a global roadmap away from fossil fuels, but it was blocked by fossil fuel-producing nations. To move past these obstructions, Colombia and the Netherlands decided to convene the fossil fuel phase-out summit, which will host ministers for high-level discussions on April 28 and 29.
The group of countries headed to Santa Marta includes COP31 hosts Australia and Türkiye, as well as European, Latin American, Asian, African and Pacific nations. Some large fossil-fuel producers are on the list, including Canada, Norway, Brazil and Nigeria, but the US, China, India and Russia will not attend.
At this week’s Petersberg Climate Dialogue, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told governments that “when multilateral processes move slowly, concrete alliances of the willing can take us a long way”, in a hint at the voluntary initiatives expected to emerge from the Santa Marta discussions.
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Fossil fuel crisis offers chance to speed up energy transition, ministers say
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To avoid COP mistakes, Santa Marta conference must be shielded from fossil fuel influence
The first global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels must learn the lessons from the struggling UN climate process and free itself from polluting influence
Brazil’s COP30 CEO Ana Toni told journalists this week that UN negotiations can “take a long time”, adding that the Santa Marta summit can start a complementary process to “keep the debate about transitioning away at the highest political level”. Brazil is working on a separate roadmap for a global fossil fuel transition due to be presented ahead of COP31, which will draw on the Santa Marta conclusions as well as submissions from countries and other interested parties.
At a webinar hosted by Climate Home News, Colombia’s environment minister Irene Vélez Torres said the Santa Marta summit is winning “global attention” in part because countries have reached a “breaking point” at UN climate talks, which have been gridlocked by fossil fuel-producing countries.
“There is a natural blockade of those themes in the multilateral agendas,” the Colombian minister said. The recent conflict in the Middle East has added renewed importance to the debate by “showing us that we cannot be dependent on fossil fuels anymore”, she emphasised.
Toni also noted that, in the context of the war in Iran, “if anybody had a doubt, I think now it’s absolutely clear we need to take those very hard steps.”
Several climate ministers at the Petersberg Dialogue – including Türkiye’s COP31 president Murat Kurum – urged countries to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels by boosting renewable energy deployment not only for climate reasons but also for energy security.
The effects of the oil and gas crisis driven by the Iran war, which has cut off exports from the Middle East, are already showing in the real economy. Countries in Africa and Asia are importing record amounts of solar power components from China, in an effort to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
Opportunity for “inflection point”
While the Santa Marta conference will not deliver a major negotiated agreement, observers said it could spur new coalitions and contribute to speeding up the energy transition by exploring the concrete policies and finance needed to drive an equitable shift away from fossil fuels. A summary report of the proceedings is due to be published by June.
WWF’s global climate lead, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who served as COP president for Peru in 2014, said in a statement that reducing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels requires “a rapid, global shift to renewable power, smarter grids and efficiency”.
“We need a ‘coalition of the willing’ to show us the way. Santa Marta is an inflection point and an opportunity that we should not miss,” he said.
Natalie Jones, senior policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), said countries have the opportunity to form a “coalition of doers” that sends the message that “the transition is happening, and the countries that are here are the ones making it happen”.
To phase out fossil fuels, developing countries need exit route from “debt trap”
In the lead-up to the conference, a group of Pacific island nations – which have historically championed a 1.5C limit to global warming and a phase-out of fossil fuels – launched a declaration for a “fossil fuel-free Pacific” and urged countries to “support the ongoing development of a comprehensive, robust, actionable global roadmap” away from fossil fuels. Many island economies are still highly dependent on expensive fossil fuel imports, though most are already adding solar, geothermal and other renewables.
Toni noted that several coalitions on fossil fuels already exist – such as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) in which members commit to phasing out oil and gas domestically or a Dutch-led coalition to phase out fossil fuel subsidies – but these must be strengthened.
Beginning of a process
Aside from governments, the Santa Marta conference will also host Indigenous people and local communities, scientists, cities, unions, green groups and the private sector to share research and recommendations on how to best phase out fossil fuels.
These civil society actors will meet from April 24 to 27 for preliminary discussions that will inform the debate among ministers.
On Friday, scientists are expected to launch a new high-level panel that will provide advice for policy-makers to support the international transition away from fossil fuels, as well as a scientific report laying out key recommendations for governments. According to a draft seen by Carbon Brief, these range from halting fossil fuel expansion to cutting methane emissions from the energy sector and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.
Another barrier to the clean energy transition that will be on the agenda in Santa Marta is an international system formally known as “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS), which enables companies to use trade agreements to sue governments that block private-sector projects like coal mines or oil exploration.
Ahead of the conference, more than 340 civil society organisations signed an open statement saying that ISDS “threatens a just transition from fossil fuels and the urgent need for a social and ecological transformation for people and the planet”. They called on governments to start building a coalition of countries committed to freeing themselves from ISDS, after Colombia announced recently it would withdraw from the system. Doing so will be complicated in practice and require coordinated action among states, experts told Climate Home News.
Colombia pledges to exit investment protection system after fossil fuel lawsuits
Colombian minister Vélez explained that one of the key outcomes from Santa Marta will be to kickstart a longer process that continues next year with a second fossil fuel phase-out conference in the Pacific island state of Tuvalu. Jones of IISD said “this is only the start of a process” in which more nations can decide to participate later.
“Other countries that wish to join this space in good faith would be welcome, so it’s a question of whether fossil fuel producers are ready to have these conversations in all their complexity,” she added.
The post Sixty countries head to Santa Marta to cement coalition for fossil fuel transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/04/23/sixty-countries-head-to-santa-marta-to-cement-coalition-for-fossil-fuel-transition/
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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