SANTA MARTA PROCESS

It is essential to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and keep a 1.5°C future within reach. It is also essential to respond to current economic, social, and geopolitical shocks while building long-term energy security, resilience, and a basis for economic prosperity that is grounded in social and environmental sustainability.

Meaningful progress often begins with a small group prepared to move forward. Collective action should be grounded in shared objectives while recognizing different national and territorial realities. Ambition and inclusiveness can advance together when countries cooperate around practical solutions and mutual support.

These favorable conditions include falling renewable energy costs, technological innovation, and growing experience with implementation. Yet, opportunities and benefits remain unevenly distributed. Ensuring that all countries and communities can benefit requires stronger governance, international cooperation, and reforms to address barriers and implementation, to generate further ambition.

It is a broad economic, political, social, and institutional transformation, from the global to the local level, to overcome structural dependencies. It involves governance systems, local knowledge, existing decision-making processes, and looking at financial flows, sectoral dynamics, value chains, and development pathways. It therefore requires whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches capable of aligning public and private action around long-term transformation.

To accelerate the transition and expand easy, affordable, and reliable clean alternatives, a wide range of policies and instruments need to be implemented in a coherent manner – from extraction, processing and consumption of fossil fuels to the transformation of end-use sectors. Strategic planning, industrial policy, robust economic diversification, technological development, innovation, and international cooperation are all part of the solution.

Locallyled solutions already exist and must be recognized, strengthened, and scaled. The transition should not reproduce inequalities within or between countries, nor create new forms of extractivism or dependence. It should help economies and communities move towards value chains of higher quality and new economic models, and towards more resilient and inclusive development pathways, for more equitable, sustainable, and resilient societies.

Progress depends on system-wide coherence. At the heart are new or strengthened national or regional TAFF roadmaps, aligned with 1.5°C, that signal clear direction, to markets as well as domestic and international partners. This needs to be coupled with additional work on sustainable trade flows and advance green economic transformation. Pooling capacities, knowledge and resources across countries can generate significant synergies and speed-up progress.

Countries willing to accelerate the transition currently face conditions that differ. For some, addressing debt burdens, high costs of capital, limited fiscal space, technological barriers and investment frameworks are essential. Accelerated deployment of Multilateral Development Banks (MDB) support, expanded non-debt-creating finance, technology transfer and capacity building are ways to do so. Financial flows continue to be unaligned, and in most countries fossil fuel subsidies and misaligned financial incentives keep fossil fuels artificially competitive. Identifying these incentives and subsidies is necessary, for example through the publication of national inventories. Likewise, research on how to reform these is essential to advance progress towards phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

Complementarity with UNFCCC processes and other existing governance frameworks is critical to avoid duplication. Future work following the first conference will aim to defragment efforts, and ensure alignment with existing initiatives, including the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA), the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), and the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP). Countries working together can also contribute to advancing work in related processes, including the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the UN Plastics Treaty. Progress in these areas will likewise benefit the global transition away from fossil fuels. The same goes for optimization of instruments from multilateral development banks and international financial institutions, among others. It will be equally important to address existing governance and implementation gaps through additional mechanisms, initiatives and agreements.

Progress is already underway. Accelerating change requires catalytic forms of cooperation to match the scale of the challenge. By bringing together governments and a broad coalition of stakeholders, the first Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels advanced solution-oriented cooperation. With plurilateral action, grounded in multilateral consensus, we can build the practical pathways to move forward together.