A group of countries have banded together to drive the urgent transition away from fossil fuels – a welcome move as the US retreats further from climate action.

The early summer heatwave that swept across Europe was another reminder of an inescapable truth: the climate is heating up at an unprecedented pace and is ushering in a new era of extreme weather. To avoid even higher temperatures, scientists say it’s critical to rapidly phase-out the production and consumption of coal, oil and gas.

The warnings come amid significant geopolitical tensions and conflicts, which have brought concerns about energy security to the fore. The US, the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, has disengaged from international cooperation on the climate. Instead, it’s actively pushing to sell more of its liquefied natural gas to the world.

In spite of the headwinds, a group of countries is taking action to heed the call on the climate emergency. A multilateral ‘coalition of the willing’, which includes Brazil, Canada, Nigeria and the UK, has come together to plan coordinated action to transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy systems.

In April, 57 countries representing around a third of global GDP met in the coastal resort of Santa Marta, Colombia, for talks. Their goal was to plan a viable route away from the use of coal, oil and gas – a subject that has proven too contentious for the formal UN climate negotiation process.

The deadlock

Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the dominant cause of the climate crisis. Pacific island nations facing existential threats from rising sea levels have long led efforts to put the need to transition away from fossil fuels on the agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks.

But large fossil fuel producing countries, notably the Gulf states and Russia, have repeatedly blocked these attempts, instead pushing for the negotiations to focus on reducing emissions rather than addressing their source. As a result, the need to move away from coal, oil and gas has only twice been reflected in the outcomes of the UN climate negotiations since they began in 1995.

In 2021, the agreement reached at COP26 in Glasgow, in the UK, called on countries to phase down unabated coal power and to phase out inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels. Two years later, the outcome agreement of COP28 in Dubai called on countries ‘to contribute to’ a list of goals, including ‘[transitioning] away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.’

‘Unfortunately, at the UNFCCC, there has been an effort to block a direct discussion on fossil fuels,’ says Alex Rafalowicz, Director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Rafalowicz’s organisation is advocating for a fossil fuel treaty to complement the Paris Agreement and is backed by a coalition of 18 Small Island States and developing countries.

The deadlock came to a head at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in 2025, where more than 80 countries called for the Conference to agree to develop a roadmap for how countries could transition away from fossil fuels. Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Guyana and Norway, countries that receive significant revenues from fossil fuels, were among those that backed the call. But their efforts were thwarted by staunch opposition from the petrostates.

In response, Brazil pledged to work on developing a global fossil fuel-exit roadmap as part of a voluntary initiative, outside the formal negotiation process. Meanwhile, Colombia and the Netherlands declared they would co-host the first international conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Santa Marta, proposing a parallel summit to address the elephant in the room.

The catalyst for conversation

Tuvalu and Ireland will now convene a second conference in 2027. The Santa Marta Conference’s organisers say the intention behind the ‘coalition of the willing’ isn’t to create a universal agreement but to build momentum to accelerate change by reducing demand for fossil fuels.

The process was inspired by international efforts to ban landmines. A ban was proposed inside the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) but failed after opposition from countries including the US and Russia. In response, states advocating for a ban created a dedicated process outside the CCW, which eventually led to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. Countries such as the US and Russia that haven’t ratified the Convention have still had to reckon with the treaty’s implications and a reduced global demand for landmines. ‘When you create a new form of international cooperation or new agreement […] you do impact the non-participating countries either by a normative effect where they feel pressure to have to comply with what other states are doing or/and through a market effect,’ says Rafalowicz.

Rajat Jariwal, an officer of the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee who’s based in New Delhi, says the Santa Marta process ‘allowed a platform for genuinely frank discussions on difficult questions such as debt, subsidies, trade and financing a just transition’ away from fossil fuels. Although India wasn’t present, ‘the ideas taken up at the conference – on finance, subsidy reform and trade – may well shape wider expectations in time,’ he says.

Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres is reported to have said that major oil and gas producers and consumers, including China, Russia and the US, weren’t invited to the Santa Marta Conference because they hadn’t shown the necessary ‘spirit’ to join the coalition. But without the largest fossil fuel producers in the room and lacking binding obligations, the coalition’s value to climate action ‘will ultimately depend on delivery and on whether it can widen participation over time,’ says Jariwal, a partner and member of the environment and climate change practice at Trilegal.

The idea of a fossil fuels treaty ‘has genuine merit,’ he adds. ‘The Paris framework regulates emissions but not production, so a country can keep approving new coal, oil and gas and still, on paper, meet its pledges and that is precisely the gap the proposal is meant to close, by halting expansion, winding down production equitably and setting up a global registry.’ He highlights however that any proposal on fossil fuels ‘remains an advocacy initiative rather than a negotiated treaty, endorsed so far by a fraction of smaller, climate-vulnerable states, so for now its weight is more moral than operative.’

J Michael Showalter, an officer of the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee, says the Santa Marta coalition process of bringing people together in one place and sharing ideas for addressing the biggest sources of emissions is ‘positive.’ In his view, that the conversation isn’t happening at the UN ‘doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter. People are engaging and trying to say “OK, given the constraints that we have and that some of these countries aren’t willing to participate or be engaged on this, what else can we do?” That’s always going to be a valuable conversation.’

But if the coalition tries to use a trading or financial mechanism at the expense of the US, President Donald Trump will probably respond, adds Showalter, a partner at ArentFox Schiff based in Chicago. He warns that what Trump might perceive as ‘cartel-like behaviour in the international system is something that sets the President off.’

America’s retreat

The momentum behind the Santa Marta coalition comes as President Trump makes a greater effort than any other US president to dismantle his country’s climate regulatory regime and scientific architecture, as well as to withdraw America from international climate negotiations.

The Trump administration has also auctioned off rights to drill for oil in a national wildlife refuge in Alaska, although the process attracted only two bidders, with just five of the 60 tracts of land opened up for leasing receiving offers. At the same time, solar and wind, which are cheaper than fossil fuels, now produce more of America’s electricity than coal.

And yet, the climate crisis isn’t a first order issue for many in the country, with energy affordability taking precedence ahead of the midterm elections in November. Instead, ‘the bigger part of the debate right now is the federal government trying to use its powers to stamp out state efforts to push a more climate forward agenda,’ says Showalter. For example, the Trump administration has sought to quash ‘climate superfund’ bills that several states have brought forward. These bills would require large fossil fuel producers and refiners to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars of state-level climate adaptation infrastructure by imposing liability for greenhouse gas pollution. The approach is modelled on a piece of US legislation from 1980 that imposes liability for the clean-up of water and land pollution.

President Trump says such bills are ‘fundamentally irreconcilable with my administration’s objective to unleash American energy.’ Meanwhile, the US Climate Alliance – made up of 24 states and territories that remain committed to climate action – has pushed back, stating that the initiatives are ‘solutions to the climate crisis that safeguard Americans’ fundamental right to clean air and water, create good-paying jobs, grow the clean energy economy and make our future healthier and safer.’

In the international arena, President Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement for a second time and initiated the process to exit the UNFCCC, the international treaty that underpins cooperation on climate action. The US will formally leave in early 2027. ‘As a practical matter though, the US has been acting de facto like a non-party since the beginning of the second Trump administration,’ says Sue Biniaz, who served as a lawyer and climate negotiator at the US State Department for nearly 30 years. For the first time, there was no US delegation at the UN climate talks in 2025 and Washington has already ceased implementing its obligations under the UNFCCC, for example by ignoring the requirement to publish an annual inventory of greenhouse gas emissions generated across the country.

The spirit of change

For Biniaz – one of the architects of the Paris Agreement – the establishment of the Santa Marta coalition has less to do with the situation in the US than the way the discussion on fossil fuels was handled at COP30 in 2025. The coalition is part of a growing number of parallel initiatives outside the more cumbersome UN climate process that are intended to deliver faster climate action. ‘Meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement can’t be achieved just by the agreement itself. The Paris Agreement can’t do it alone,’ says Biniaz.

Alden Meyer, a senior associate at think-tank E3G and a veteran observer of the UN climate negotiations, agrees that the Santa Marta coalition would have been set up regardless of the Trump administration’s actions, given the staunch opposition from some oil and gas producing countries to the idea of a process to find a path away from fossil fuels.

Highlighting that these energy sources have ‘powered the global economy for over 150 years,’ Meyer says that moving away from them is ‘going to take time and effort and money to do.’ He adds, however, that ‘the rest of the world is not going to wait for the United States or Saudi Arabia or Russia or other fossil fuel producing countries to get down with the programme. They are going to go ahead and chart their own path forward.’

The war between the US-Israel alliance and Iran and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil and gas trade route, has highlighted the vulnerability of fossil fuel-based economies to geopolitical risks and price shocks, says Meyer, and has heightened the case for countries to cut their reliance on volatile oil and gas. ‘So even if climate change was not an existential threat, there would be a lot of economic and self-interest reasons for countries to pursue decarbonisation,’ he says.

‘Our goal is to bring the spirit that change is possible,’ said Dutch climate policy minister Stientje van Veldhoven, who co-hosted the Santa Marta Conference, at London Climate Action Week in June. ‘We will make sure that the Santa Marta Conference is not a separate, parallel process to the COP’ but ‘strengthens’ the negotiations without becoming a formal part of them, she added. What that looks like in practice and what criteria might apply if other countries or sub-national actors wish to join the process remain unclear.

The states and territories making up the US Climate Alliance represent over half of America’s population and nearly two-thirds of its GDP. Among them, the states of California and Maine have endorsed the idea of a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. In time, they might engage with the coalition behind the Santa Marta Conference.

Chloé Farand is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at Chloe.Farand@outlook.com

Header image: Jacob Stead https://www.illustrationx.com/uk/artists/JacobStead