source: nacla
From April 24-29, 2026, people from across the globe will converge in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the First Conference on Transitioning away from Fossil Fuels. The conference is the first in 31 years of international climate negotiations dedicated specifically to transitioning away from fossil fuels, a focus that departs from the more limited scope of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
This convergence is a notable step forward. During the six-day event, at least 50 states will be involved, guided by co-hosts Colombia and the Netherlands. The conference follows the successful Peoples’ Summit in Belém, Brazil, a gathering last November in which social movements, labor unions and frontline workers, Afro-descendants, and Indigenous Peoples achieved broad alignment on just transition demands. The grassroots movement power-building generated during the summit continues to exert positive pressure, as a significant number of countries are finally signaling a willingness to address the elephant in the room: fossil fuels.
Even still, we ask: will the conversations and priorities that emerge from the Santa Marta meeting align with a just transition that responds to the urgency of this moment?
Indeed, this current juncture—characterized by multiple, overlapping crises of economic instability, militarism, and climate breakdown—must be approached with urgency, while ensuring no additional relational harm and striving to repair previous damages. The destructive use of fossil fuels as a weapon against people’s right to access reliable energy, which has spurred growing support for energy sovereignty, has made clear that a just transition is a matter of life and death. Social movements will not allow this historic gathering to serve as an opportunity for countries failing to meet basic Paris Agreement expectations to claim that they are climate champions just for showing up at the conference.
Ending Fossil Fuel-Powered Violence
The conference in Santa Marta comes amidst mounting wars and occupations that have been openly driven by extractivist pursuits to control land and oil, dynamics that have profoundly impacted the region. Santa Marta, a port city known for its large amount of coal exports, is not far from the country’s border with Venezuela, the target of a U.S. invasion in January to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that experts widely believe was motivated by extractivist, expansionist pursuits entangled with oil. This militarized violence has been but the latest chapter in a centuries-old playbook of U.S. imperialism, “interventionism,” and exploitation in Latin America.
The continuity of fossil fuel-based economies is enabling the weaponization of energy access and reliability as a tool of mass suffering.
We at the Just Transition Alliance (JTA) join calls insisting on no more blood and war for oil in Venezuela, Iran, and beyond. The continuity of fossil fuel-based economies is enabling the weaponization of energy access and reliability as a tool of mass suffering. All the while, gas and oil companies are making record profits from lethal fossil fuel-based economies. In the first month of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, top gas and oil companies have reportedly made $30 million per hour in “unearned” profits because of increased oil prices.
Countries in the Global South, those most affected by the war on Iran’s surging energy prices, have highlighted both the crisis and the necessity for action in the current moment. Colombia’s environment minister, Irene Vélez Torres, recently argued that the “global crisis” caused by war in the Middle East should be a push toward “radicalizing the green agenda and the transitions.” But, this “radicalizing” cannot be just any transition; as we have argued elsewhere, we need a specifically just transition. This process involves not only ensuring that affected workers and communities are not left behind but also redirects and distributes material resources to the most impacted peoples so that they can lead and make their own self-determined, just transition paths. This process requires advocating for good-paying, dignified work that puts human and more-than-human health as the priority, rather than corporate profits and the imperial war machine. A just transition understands energy as a basic right—one that requires organizing beyond the harms, violence, and death of the current system.
Building the Peace and Care Economy
One way to challenge violent wars and ecocide is by moving toward a peace and care economy. This alternative opens spaces for healing ourselves, each other, and the planet. For veterans and those currently active in and exploited by the military industrial complex, opportunities exist for imagining and creating paths toward new roles, where people can find trades and other work that generates life-giving relationalities, instead of destruction fueled by concentrated money and power. Just one of many alternatives involves providing good-paying electrician jobs to advance community-owned and maintained solar projects.
A peace and care economy will not be possible without a major redistribution of abundant wealth, though global elites often claim the transition would be financially impossible. Nevertheless, as Oil Change International found in its September 2025 report, redirecting military spending and fossil fuel subsidies, taxing corporations for their fair share, and practicing the Polluter Pays Principle and debt justice all can provide just transition funding. Without this redirecting and prioritizing, unconscionable military spending will persist, denying climate justice and reparations in the Global South and the Global South of the North. We need reparations that uphold the rights of Mother Earth, including inherent rights and obligations, in alignment with the “Rights of Mother Earth” Preamble from Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010. These climate justice histories, made by frontline workers and communities, land defenders, and water protectors, continue to shape present-day just transition organizing.
During COP30 in November, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Descendants, and frontline workers and communities persisted in building on previous movement work at the Peoples’ Summit in Bélem. Indeed, the region’s long history of grassroots organizing and global solidarities for crafting historic climate and environmental justice declarations helped to shape the summit, which emphasized the importance of a Just, Popular, and Inclusive Transition. The Axis III Declaration, one of five axes that guided summit organizing, resulted in strong commitments that oppose ongoing extractivism, occupation, and racial capitalism, while moving toward energy and food sovereignty and intersectional and interspecies forms of care.
Funding and Centering Frontline Workers and Communities
As the global just transition movement now prepares for Santa Marta, including another People’s Summit preceding conference deliberations (Apr. 24-26), this key moment must focus on implementing a fossil fuel phaseout that is led by the most impacted workers and frontline communities. As JTA members, we strive to adhere to the Indigenous Principles of Just Transition, developed by the Indigenous Environmental Network, and JTA’s Just Transition Principles.
In addition, countries must meet the urgency of this moment by providing funding to confront climate breakdown and to advance a just transition. These two components—frontline leadership and funding—will be essential to building momentum toward COP31 this November, when deliberations about the Just Transition Mechanism implementation process begin. The mechanism stems from the Just Transition Work Programme and institutionalizes, within the UNFCCC, a commitment to supporting countries transitioning from a greenhouse-gas-intensive economy. The Mechanism is intended to facilitate climate action, and, if it is to be effective, the Mechanism must identify and try to eliminate problems that continue or worsen already present inequities caused by extractivism. The cross-constituency that pushed so hard for this COP30 outcome made clear that the Mechanism must prioritize and practice equity and center Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and frontline workers and communities, including by giving disproportionately impacted groups ample, well-supported space to lead.
Funding for a just transition must not be managed by multinational development banks, which often hold debt over the very beneficiaries of a just transition and force communities into difficult, unfair positions. We contend that funds associated with the Mechanism must support transnational and inclusive participation of affected groups in resource allocation decisions. This process will require minimizing burdens for non-state and Global South state participation; offering direct, non-debt creating funding; and enabling knowledge sharing, policy coordination, and inclusive decision-making processes.
These funds also should be differentiated. We reject the perpetuation of harmful, “one-size-fits-all” approaches because peoples, territories, and communities have their own unique needs, demands, and dreams. At the same time, challenging the underlying systems and structures that create common experiences with oppression and injustice can create space for essential solidarities and collective action. Generating the grassroots political power to continue pushing toward intersectional forms of environmental, climate, and energy justice and a just transition requires that critical attention be paid to this convergence.
Santa Marta will also be an opportunity to build movement power. This space is particularly important as we receive announcements from some Global North country diplomats that their ministers do not want to support just transition funds. Such a position shirks the responsibility of doing the necessary work that this moment demands. To create adequate pressure on high-emitting, wealthy countries, building Global North and Global South solidarities to continue powering the just transition movement will be a key mechanism for achieving a truly inclusive and just transition.
Continuing to Organize for Santa Marta and Beyond
At JTA, we have been integral in leading coordination meetings during the past few months to prepare for this global event. We stand firmly with aligned groups in our opposition to green colonialism and market-based, false-solution schemes that disproportionately harm frontline peoples. We have observed how governmental actions that constrain civil society organizing can hinder the process of a just transition. For example, limiting the number of journalists, and determining who those journalists can be, marks just one of many concerns with inclusion, power, and narrative sovereignty in Santa Marta.
We also have been on the other side of closed-door negotiations. Even when observers are allowed in the room, they often are placed in a tokenized position with no meaningful participation. This approach to determining climate policy is not solely exclusionary; it has been ineffective. We stand by the environmental justice principle that “demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation.” Despite the regular violations of this environmental justice principle, with the organizing successes in Belém still present in our minds and hearts, we will be joining our allies in Santa Marta, eager to demand “Transición justa ya!”
