Fifty-four countries walked into Santa Marta this week with a shared problem and no agreed map. By the end of the conference’s first day, they had at least the beginning of one.
Colombia and the Netherlands, co-hosting the Fast Track Fossil Fuel Transition conference, used the opening session to announce a new international science panel tasked with giving governments something they have largely lacked: credible, country-specific guidance on how to stop depending on oil, gas and coal. The panel will work across climate science, economics and energy technology, advising policymakers on the shape and pace of transitions designed to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Its leadership reflects the scale of the challenge. Vera Songwe brings the financing perspective, as Cameroonian co-chair of the High Level Expert Panel on Climate Finance. Ottmar Edenhofer brings the modelling, as director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute. Gilberto M. Jannuzzi brings the engineering, as a Brazilian professor of energy systems. The panel was convened by Potsdam’s Johan Rockström and Carlos Nobre of the University of São Paulo, and it draws partly on the structure of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, which has spent fifteen years proving that statutory, science-based advice can actually move national policy.
Jannuzzi put the challenge bluntly. “Technically, there is no problem,” he said. “The problem is how to disseminate the information and secure the financing.” In a conference room full of energy ministers and climate negotiators, that distinction carries weight. Nobody in Santa Marta is arguing that the physics doesn’t work. The argument is about money, institutions and timing.
Colombia’s draft roadmap, published alongside the panel announcement, is an attempt to answer that argument with specifics. The country derives about half its export revenue from coal, which makes it a useful test case for what an honest transition plan looks like when the stakes are high. The roadmap, drafted by international researchers working with Colombian officials, concludes that cutting fossil fuel use by 90% before 2050 would generate net economic benefits of $280 billion over 24 years. The investment required is front-loaded; the savings begin to compound in the early 2040s and keep growing.
Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at Leeds and one of the roadmap’s contributors, said the document makes two things clear that are sometimes treated as uncertain: phasing out petrol and diesel is cost-effective, and building renewables at scale is cost-effective. Energy security, which has become a more politically legible argument since 2022, ties both conclusions together.
The conference runs until 29 April, with more than 50 nations, dozens of regional governments and around 2,800 civil society representatives attending. Some of the countries in the room, Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, Angola, earn substantial revenues from the fuels they are being asked to move away from. The Colombian roadmap was designed in part to show that acknowledging that tension and working through it is more productive than ignoring it.
André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, who will preside over COP30 in Belém later this year, urged governments to use the panel’s output when they write their national climate commitments. Rockström said the panel’s value is in its continuity: not a one-off report but a running account of what needs to happen each year and whether it is happening. For countries building transition plans from scratch, that kind of ongoing technical relationship may matter more than any single document.
