Scientists Urge Colombia Summit to Halt New Fossil Fuel Projects and Reject Gas as a Bridge Fuel

Governments preparing for a first-of-its-kind fossil fuel summit in Colombia will arrive with a striking set of scientific recommendations in hand, including an explicit call to halt all new fossil fuel expansion and to reject natural gas as a so-called bridging fuel. Around fifty nations are scheduled to gather in Santa Marta from April 24 to 29 to debate how to transition away from fossil fuels, and a preliminary synthesis report circulated to those governments, seen by Carbon Brief, lays out twelve action insights and a broader suite of action recommendations designed to steer negotiators toward concrete and measurable steps. The summit follows the inability of a large bloc of nations to secure a formal roadmap away from fossil fuels at the COP30 climate summit held in Brazil the previous November, and participants are branding themselves as the coalition of the willing, with Colombia and the Netherlands serving as co-hosts.

The science behind the Santa Marta process was assembled rapidly by an ad-hoc group of roughly two dozen researchers, led by Dr. Friedrich Bohn, a research scientist and co-founder of the Earth Resilience Institute in Germany. Bohn has described how the group formed almost spontaneously after Brazil announced the forthcoming Colombian conference at COP30, with several members quickly concluding that the talks deserved a dedicated scientific underpinning. A pre-existing connection between the group and the Colombian government accelerated the dialogue, and what had initially been envisioned as a peer-reviewed academic paper evolved into a policy-facing synthesis report. Coordinating author Prof. Frank Jotzo, a professor of climate change economics at Australian National University and a former Carbon Brief contributing editor, has emphasized that the report does not claim to be exhaustive or comparable to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but rather aims to provide direct guidance to action on the most relevant topics.

At the heart of the report are twelve action insights, each accompanied by three specific action recommendations, whittled down from an initial shortlist of forty to fifty candidates. Perhaps the most consequential is action insight five, which calls on governments to take immediate measures to prevent future emissions by banning new fossil infrastructure, mandating deep methane reductions, accelerating electrification, and inscribing fossil fuel phase-down targets into their nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. The associated recommendations go further, urging countries to halt all new fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure projects before final investment decisions, to phase out subsidies for both the production and consumption of fossil fuels, and even to convene a forum to draft a legal framework that could prohibit fossil fuel advertisements.

These recommendations arrive at a politically fraught moment for the global energy debate. Oil and gas prices have soared over the past year, putting pressure on governments to approve new exploration projects and to treat liquefied natural gas as a transitional fuel that can replace coal in emerging economies. The Santa Marta synthesis report pushes back directly against that framing by rejecting the bridge fuel narrative, citing evidence that methane leakage and long infrastructure lifetimes can undermine the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. Instead, the scientists argue that investment should flow toward renewable electricity, electrification of transport and heat, and clean energy pathways in low and middle income countries, supported by concessional finance and technology transfer from wealthier nations.

Critics of the rapid assessment approach have noted that the Santa Marta report was not externally peer reviewed, that its author selection was less formal than an IPCC process, and that its contributors currently skew toward the global north and include more men than women. Bohn has acknowledged those limitations and described the effort as an attempt to balance speed and rigor in a period when policymakers have signaled openness to fresh scientific input. Jotzo has added that the work was driven by goodwill and enthusiasm among researchers eager to contribute expertise, and that the final public version due toward the end of April will be refined by academics attending the scientific segment of the summit before it is handed to policymakers.

Whether the Santa Marta talks produce binding commitments or primarily serve as a venue for political signaling remains to be seen. Previous COP meetings have shown how difficult it can be to translate scientific recommendations into actionable multilateral agreements, particularly when major fossil fuel producers hold negotiating leverage. Still, the fact that fifty nations are willing to convene specifically on the topic of phasing down fossil fuels marks a shift from earlier climate diplomacy, and the synthesis report arriving in their capitals represents a pointed intervention by the scientific community. Its central message is straightforward, namely that the window for limiting warming to manageable levels requires an immediate end to new fossil infrastructure, regardless of the political and economic complications that such a commitment would entail.