All systems go
The Santa Marta conference on fossil fuels achieved lift-off. But the process it set in motion has yet to escape the gravitational field of the existing climate regime.
SANTA MARTA, 30 APRIL 2026 — When history is written, the Santa Marta conference on fossil fuels will be remembered less — one may hope — for what it concluded, than for what it set in motion.
“Multilateralism and international cooperation are not defined by a single process, but rather by recognising the governance gaps”, said Maina Vakafua Talia at the close of the high-level gathering, as he announced Tuvalu’s intention to host — together with Ireland — a follow-up conference in the Pacific within a year.
The importance of that move can hardly be overstated. In multilateral politics, a single conference can — like a lone swallow against the wintry sky — be safely dismissed by cynics and others unwilling to believe that the world can change for the better. But a succession of conferences — an international process — indicates a stability of collective intent and cannot, for that reason, be so easily ignored.
Before Santa Marta, the big question was whether Colombia’s and the Netherlands’ fossil fuel initiative — formally launched at the COP30 climate summit in Belém — would lead somewhere. After Santa Marta, the question is no longer whether there is movement, but about the direction of travel: where to?
Defining that goal — and building a credible case for its achievement — will require significant political leadership and a willingness to do things differently. The co-hosts’ conclusions, presented as their “takeaways” in the closing plenary on Wednesday afternoon, show more than anything how difficult it will be to escape the paralysing gravitational field of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The narrative had been a defiant one when the Santa Marta conference was first announced in November. “We must keep the momentum, lead with bravery, rise to the challenge, and build a coalition of the willing”, Irene Vélez Torres of Colombia said as she invited “all willing countries” to Santa Marta to chart “legal, economic, and social pathways” to phase out fossil fuels.
We need to “leave the old behind” and capitalise on the “clear momentum to phase out fossil fuels”, Sophie Hermans of the Netherlands followed up.
In the months leading up to the conference, the narrative turned increasingly assertive. This is “the moment in which history is going to split”, Vélez told The Guardian in mid-April. “Whatever nations have not taken that decision, then this is not a space for them. We are not going to have boycotters or climate denialists at the table.”
A series of background papers circulated to the participating states ahead of the conference appeared to confirm the intent: The 57 participating countries represented roughly one third of global consumption of fossil fuels, the papers noted, while suggesting that “more flexible” decision-making formats, “common political signals” and “treaty-based or other cooperation frameworks” may be needed to overcome “fragmented national efforts”.
But somewhere between the drafting of those papers and the closing plenary, someone, it seems, lost their nerve.
“The aim was not to develop new targets”, the co-hosts stated in their draft takeaways report, highlighting that the point of the Santa Marta conference had merely been to create a “safe space for dialogue” rather than a forum for negotiation. Gone from their summary was any talk of coalitions of the willing, treaty-based frameworks, or how the conference participants could use their collective consumer power strategically to shape global fossil fuel markets.
Instead, the co-hosts took great pains to point out the need to avoid “duplication”, ensure “complementarity with UNFCCC,” and to “feed into” the COP process, all the while replicating — through a workstream on roadmaps — the voluntary, nationally-driven, and therefore consensus-based, logic of the existing regime.
It is not difficult to understand the temptation to bow to established processes. No state likes to be accused of undermining an existing treaty, especially not one that attracts as much participation, political interest and media attention as the UNFCCC.
Yet, the problem structure of fossil fuels remains: a classic collective action problem, it carries strong free-riding incentives. It is clear that without common, legally binding rules — including clear phase-out timelines, guaranteed finance, and trade restrictions against uncooperative countries — the Santa Marta coalition risks becoming a coalition of the shortchanged, forever cheated by the extractive interests of less conscientious states.
The co-hosts may, of course, have had their reasons for downplaying the call for a treaty. If the aim is to build the strongest possible coalition around a set of common, binding rules, it may be wise to allow hesitant countries the time to arrive at that conclusion themselves — even if that means trying, one last time, to achieve the required result within the established structures at COP31 in November. When — not if — that fails, the call for a new treaty could obtain the gravity assist needed to slingshot the process into a formal process of negotiations.
The question is not whether the Santa Marta conference mattered. It clearly did and there is no doubt that the process to transition away from fossil fuels achieved lift-off. Its invite-only format opened the door to a new type of climate diplomacy, where debates are not obstructed by spoilers, where decisions are not based on the lowest-common-denominator, and where the will of the majority matters more than the objections of the least ambitious players.
Yet, the arc of climate diplomacy bends towards paralysis. To make Santa Marta truly count, ambitious countries must scale up their work in the coming months and build a case for how they can use international law more strategically to achieve their goal — while protecting the coalition’s interests against those who would rather see it fail.