• We meet at COP31 after a year in which no region was spared. A glacier collapse in Nepal killed more than 1,300 people, a heatwave left over 35,000 dead across Europe, and fires burned from Canada to North Africa and Indonesia. Drought gripped the Caribbean, and Typhoon Dujuan forced 1.9 million people in Japan to evacuate. Now a super El Niño is strengthening, and its effects are already being felt around the world.

• The root cause of this destruction is fossil fuel production, responsible for 86% of carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade. And the toll of our expansion of oil, gas and coal extraction runs well beyond the climate crisis: their emissions drive climate disasters, and their revenues fuel conflicts. The wars in Ukraine and Iran, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, are financed by oil and gas revenues and tied to control over hydrocarbons and the routes that carry them.

• In every war, civilians pay with their lives, their homes and their futures. The deepening energy crisis is pushing up bills for struggling households everywhere and driving fossil fuel extraction ever further and deeper, with the communities living alongside it the first to bear the cost.

• For much of the Global South, the cost also comes as debt. In 2024, low and middle-income countries paid a record $415 billion in interest on their external debt, and $205 billion more to creditors than they received in new loans. Many now spend more servicing debt than on health, education or climate action. To keep paying, governments are pushed to expand oil, gas and coal for hard currency, deepening their exposure to the price shocks and climate disasters that drove their debt up in the first place. 

• Meanwhile, oil majors have cashed in: the Iran-driven price spike alone brought eight listed companies close to $93 billion in three months, nearly double what they made the year before, while the rest of us faced growing inflation and a cost of living crisis.

• The UN Environment Programme's Limiting Overshoot report said plainly that the world is already pushing past 1.5°C. But every degree matters, and only rapid, rigorous action on fossil fuel phase out will limit peak temperatures, shorten the overshoot and keep open the possibility of bringing the world back below 1.5°C.

• The world's highest court has confirmed that acting on fossil fuels is also a legal obligation: in its Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice ruled that a State's failure to act on fossil fuel production, licensing or subsidies can be an internationally wrongful act under international law.

• Scientists, judges and the people living through these fossil-fuelled disasters are now saying the same thing: fossil fuels must be phased out, and fast. Yet the world's largest producers have barely responded and governments still plan to produce more than double the fossil fuels in 2030 that would be consistent with 1.5°C.

• Fossil fuels keep expanding for a simple reason: no international instrument governs its production, coordinates its phase-out, manages the shared economic consequences or aligns trade, investment and finance rules with the transition. The Paris Agreement is an important instrument, but it was built to govern emissions. It currently doesn't name oil, gas or coal, and leaves the extraction side of the crisis untouched.

• Another climate disaster and another energy shock will come, the only question is when. But how many lives they cost is still up to governments who can work together toward a managed, fair decline in production that cuts emissions, eases the pressures behind conflict and protects human rights and energy security. 

• There is no path to 1.5°C that isn’t fair. Equity is what makes it possible, because a transition that leaves countries, workers and communities to carry the costs alone will stall long before it reaches the pace that science demands. 

• But no country can do this alone. International cooperation is the only way out of the crisis.

COP30 Presidency Roadmap for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels: Announced after fossil fuel language was dropped from the Belém outcome, and due to launch ahead of or at COP31. It draws on input from 115 countries and 247 non-state actors, and maps the barriers to and pathways for moving away from fossil fuels in energy systems.

Guidance for the transition is critical, but the Roadmap is not binding and sets no targets. It is helpful guidance that only matters if countries commit to the policies and mechanisms it describes. Each government is left to write its own plan, and they will go further if they do it together.

National roadmaps: They set out what countries intend to do at home. France, the Netherlands and Germany have already published theirs, and these efforts should be encouraged.

Roadmaps rest on national efforts. Those matter, but like nationally determined contributions, they are voluntary and aren’t coordinated globally: each country sets its own pace and level of ambition, with no shared benchmark and no equity dimension on who should move first, how fast, or with what support. Even among wealthy countries, ambition varies widely: France sets end dates for coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas by 2050, while the Netherlands plans to expand domestic gas production. In addition, many countries will not be able to build national roadmaps without further international cooperation to address structural financial barriers such as debt. 

The Just Transition Mechanism, known in civil society as the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM): created at COP30 and expected to be made operational at COP31, it would give governments a standing space to cooperate on support for workers and communities and to track progress.

The BAM does not address fossil fuel production directly. It can help workers and communities through the transition, but it can’t decide what gets phased out or by when, so the pace is still set elsewhere. It brings no new finance, which leaves countries relying on climate finance that mostly arrives as loans. 

Anything negotiated within the UNFCCC, like the Paris Agreement, the BAM or any formal endorsement of the COP30 roadmap at COP31, operates under consensus, so a single state can block outcomes. Consensus-based decision making has let a few objecting countries stall outcomes the majority supports, and fossil fuel interests have long worked to keep it that way. In practice, consensus within the UNFCCC works as a veto for the states with the most at stake in continued production, which is why trade rules, debt and technology transfer have sat unresolved for years.

Santa Marta Process: Born from the First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands in April 2026. It opens the first dedicated space outside the formal UNFCCC negotiations for countries ready to support solutions based on international cooperation, such as a Fossil Fuel Treaty. The second conference will be co-hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland in July 2027.

• None of these tracks can do the job alone, and none has to. Few global challenges are governed by a single treaty, and climate change is no exception. International governance evolves: as our understanding of a problem shifts and political will changes, new agreements, rules and processes are built on what came before. The climate regime is part of a broader, interconnected body of international law, which makes it adaptable to new science and new opportunities for cooperation. These layers do not compete. They are all needed, and each covers ground the others can’t.

• A Fossil Fuel Treaty would fill the gaps they leave. It is the most comprehensive proposed instrument: binding, time-bound, centered on equity, and able to serve as an umbrella for the other tracks. It would coordinate national efforts against a shared benchmark, tackle production directly, and give countries ready to move a way forward that no single state can block. Designed to complement and reinforce the Paris Agreement, it would give the UNFCCC a concrete plan and the mechanisms to move away equitably from the main drivers of the multiple and deepening crises our world faces.

• COP31 talks need to keep strengthening what the Paris Agreement already provides, like nationally determined contributions, roadmaps and the BAM, while opening space for and supporting new complementary forums and legally binding instruments, like the Santa Marta Process and a Fossil Fuel Treaty, that tackle what Paris was never designed to deliver.

• Governments ready to cooperate on a fair phase-out are already coming together. In Santa Marta, 57 countries and over 2,000 stakeholders met, and the co-chairs' report concluded that closing the governance gap requires action within and beyond the UNFCCC. 80% of participating sectors called for a new international framework, with a Fossil Fuel Treaty the most prominently supported proposal.

• The Santa Marta Process is proof that states and non-state actors can cooperate to act on the transition. Complementary to the UNFCCC, it is the forum where concrete solutions such as a Fossil Fuel Treaty can be discussed and a negotiating mandate advanced.

• The Bloc of Nations Developing a Fossil Fuel Treaty is now working toward that mandate.

• The Second Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, co-chaired by Tuvalu and Ireland, will take place in the Pacific in July 2027. At the UN General Assembly in September, the hosts have announced it will focus on "international cooperation and action rather than further diagnosis and dialogue", and should soon share details on participation from different sectors.

• A negotiating mandate is a decision States take to authorise negotiations and settle their basic terms in advance: the form of the instrument, its scope, the forum, the timeline and the decision-making rules. It does not bind States to substantive obligations, but every question left open at the mandate stage becomes a point of contention once negotiations begin. 

• Getting the mandate right is what makes an ambitious treaty possible. A successful mandate will also balance the political feasibility of securing a critical mass of countries representing different economies (both fossil fuel producers and consumers) and geographies (ideally from every continent) to allow the treaty to have maximum impact without compromising on ambition, through a clearly articulated scope.

• A Fossil Fuel Treaty would rest on three pillars: a just and financed transition for every worker, community and country that enables governments to end the expansion of new oil, gas and coal production, as well as equitably phase out existing production. Within that framework, a Treaty would rest on two foundations: benchmarks that set the standard for the transition, and mechanisms that make it possible.

• Benchmarks: ending expansion, with no new oil, gas or coal projects since existing fields and mines already exceed the 1.5°C carbon budget; an equitable phase-out of existing production, differentiated by historical responsibility, capacity and national circumstances, with wealthier and less-dependent producers moving first and fastest; and safeguards that protect workers and affected communities and prevent new harms, including green extractivism.

• Mechanisms: concessional finance from developed countries, alongside the Treaty’s own sources such as levies on fossil fuel production and exports, sovereign wealth funds and a buyers-sellers club that benefits participating States; a debt facility offering restructuring and relief tied to the transition; and coordinated action on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) and investment treaties.

• A Fossil Fuel Treaty is the plan that brings all phase-out tracks together and reinforces Paris, by providing the producer–consumer cooperation basis no existing instrument offers, translating the ICJ obligations into equity principles based on capacity, dependence and responsibility, establishing transparency on production and subsidies, and creating standing governance for finance, debt relief and diversification.

• The momentum is already there: more than 25 Global South countries from every continent are participating in the Bloc of Nations Developing a Fossil Fuel Treaty. They are backed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Parliament, over 4,300 civil society organisations, 1,000 parliamentarians, 3,000 scientists, 200 subnational governments, Indigenous Peoples, businesses, youth, faith institutions, and over a million individuals worldwide.

• The next step is a negotiating mandate, and the bloc of nations developing the Treaty is working to secure it at the Second Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland in 2027.

Limiting Overshoot

• The report is a definitive warning: the world is no longer on a trajectory to stay within 1.5°C and is set to cross the threshold within the coming years. 2024 was already the first full calendar year above 1.5°C, and the last ten years are the ten warmest on record.

• UNEP sets out an "overshoot, peak and decline" pathway as the most viable strategy. The key variables we still control are the depth and duration of overshoot. Every fraction of a degree and every year spent above 1.5°C raises the risk of irreversible tipping points, with ice sheet loss, coral reef collapse, permafrost thaw, monsoon disruption.

• For island nations like Tuvalu, Kiribati or Antigua & Barbuda, the depth and duration of overshoot is the difference between a habitable homeland and none.

• The case for stopping expansion now is stronger than ever. Every new barrel, every tonne of coal, every new gas field is a decision to make the overshoot deeper and longer – and to make its consequences fall hardest on those who did least to cause it.

• Relying on speculative carbon removal and other unproven technologies at scale to bring temperatures back down is a gamble with other people's lives. The only certain way to limit overshoot is to stop adding to the problem.

• Minimising overshoot means: no new fossil fuel projects or investments now; an equitable, managed phase-out of existing production; and a fast, fair transition to renewable energy capable of powering everyone, everywhere.

Electrification

• Electrification has real value, especially in Africa, home to most of the world’s people without access to electricity, where expanding access is essential for development. But as a climate measure, it only works if it goes hand in hand with phasing out fossil fuel supply. Fossil fuels still accounted for nearly 60% of global electricity generation in 2024, which means an electrification target could, in principle, be reached without any meaningful shift in the energy mix, if coal and gas generation simply continues or expands alongside it. Worse, in some contexts it could be used to make a case for the expansion of gas-fired electricity generation.

• Electrification also speaks primarily to demand: it says less about the extraction, expansion or export of the fuels that continue to supply it. And it relies on critical minerals whose extraction, if left unmanaged, risks repeating the same pattern, with communities in the Global South, and Indigenous Peoples in particular, paying the price for an energy system built to serve others. Delegations can support electrification while noting, constructively, that its value depends on where the electricity comes from, and its fairness on how the minerals behind it are sourced. A Fossil Fuel Treaty could address both, by phasing out fossil fuel supply and setting safeguards against green extractivism. 

The Santa Marta Process

• Tuvalu and Ireland will co-host the Second Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in July 2027, in the Pacific.

• The process will carry forward all elements of the work begun in Santa Marta, anchored in its three pillars:

  • Overcoming economic dependence on fossil fuel production;

  • Transforming fossil fuel supply and demand in line with 1.5°C;

  • Advancing international cooperation, including closing governance gaps.

• The aim is to advance, elaborate and deepen the solutions placed on the table in Santa Marta, so that the Second Conference moves this process from dialogue to implementation through 4 workstreams to be confirmed.

• Its value lies in bringing together the countries and sectors that genuinely want to make progress on phasing out fossil fuels and design mutually beneficial solutions – on finance, debt, diversification, trade, and transparency. 

• The Second Conference will crystallise those discussions into real, actionable outcomes driven by groups of willing countries.