The venue was a theatre. The audience, government ministers. The message, delivered by scientists who’d flown to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, was that the window for an orderly transition away from fossil fuels is narrowing faster than policy is moving.
Friday’s launch of the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition in Santa Marta wasn’t timed by coincidence. Ministers from 57 countries were due to convene there the following Tuesday for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, and the scientists behind SPGET wanted to hand them something concrete before the speeches started.
Johan Rockström, the Potsdam Institute’s director, stood on the Santa Marta Theatre stage and described the current moment with a phrase that landed harder than the usual academic circumspection: “a very dark moment.” Geopolitical fractures, accelerating climate extremes, weakening multilateral institutions. Against that backdrop, he said, the panel offers “a light in the tunnel.”
The panel’s design reflects a specific frustration. The IPCC, the closest thing the world has to a climate science authority, produces comprehensive assessments that governments must formally approve before release. That approval process has become a pressure point: oil-producing states have learned to use it, and recent cycles have seen increasingly visible efforts to dilute or delay key findings. SPGET, created under a mandate from COP30, operates differently. Its scope is narrower, its focus fixed on the phase-out of fossil fuels, and its intended cycle faster.
Natalie Jones of the International Institute of Sustainable Development described it as “more specific, more targeted and potentially more agile.” That last word carries weight. The IPCC’s seven-year reporting cycle was designed for depth, not speed. The energy transition requires both, and the panel is betting it can provide the latter without sacrificing the former.
Colombia offered itself as the opening proof of concept. A group of European researchers, working alongside the Colombian government, produced a draft roadmap for decarbonising one of Latin America’s more fossil-fuel-dependent economies. Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, who co-authored the document, presented the economic case: $10.6 billion in average annual investment, $23 billion in net annual economic benefit by 2050. The pathway runs through efficiency improvements, renewable energy storage integration, and a shift to electric transport.
The roadmap also contains a line that rarely appears in official government communications but needs to: fossil fuel export revenues could drop by around half before 2035. Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres acknowledged the gap without flinching, describing SPGET as addressing “a longstanding shortcoming” in international climate science.
Peter Newell, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex, offered a note of realistic caution. The barriers to phasing out fossil fuels aren’t mainly scientific, he said. Evidence is not what’s lacking. That observation doesn’t diminish the panel’s value; it just clarifies what the panel can and cannot do. It can establish what’s physically and economically possible. The rest is a political question.
The panel’s leadership spans three continents: Vera Songwe, an economist from Cameroon; Ottmar Edenhofer, PIK’s chief economist; and Gilberto Jannuzzi from Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Working groups will cover pathways, technology, policy, and finance. The 12 opening recommendations include banning new fossil fuel infrastructure, mandatory methane reductions, carbon import levies, and central bank action to lower the cost of clean energy investment.
Twelve recommendations, 57 governments, one conference. The science is in the room. The question is what the ministers do when they leave it.
