Irene Velez Torres, Director of the Colombian National Environmental Agency, during a panel discussion with policy experts at the Santa Marta Conference. Credit: Supplied

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SRINAGAR, India, May 6 2026 (IPS)

The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, may eventually be remembered as a defining moment in global climate politics, not because it produced a treaty or a formal negotiation outcome, but because it changed the tone, structure, and ambition of the conversation itself.

For decades, international climate diplomacy has been about managing emissions, not addressing the source of those emissions: fossil fuels. Governments continued to discuss carbon markets, offsets and adaptation funds but so too did the growth in oil, gas and coal production. Within the UN climate process itself, producer nations and powerful economic interests often blocked direct discussion of phasing out fossil fuels. However, there was no such case as Santa Marta.

The conference, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands and attended by delegates from almost 60 nations, was not intended to be another COP-style negotiation. It was explicitly designed as a political and practical platform for those countries willing to move faster on the fossil fuel phase-out. That makes a difference.

“This was not a negotiating conference. This is about dialogue and looking together at what we can do and how we can apply our creativity, our collaboration, and the science to find new opportunities,” said Stientje van Veldhoven-van der Meer, Dutch Climate and Green Growth Minister.

The conference’s most important accomplishment might be the single transition from negotiation to problem-solving.

Traditional COP summits often descend into exercises in diplomatic survival, with countries fighting over language late into the night and protecting narrow interests. In Santa Marta, ministers repeatedly stressed that participants were not there to defend positions but to create solutions.

“The contrast was stark,” said Minina Talia, Tuvalu’s Minister for Home Affairs, Climate Change and Environment.

“I’ve been to a lot of COPs over the years and I’ve never felt like this. More chilled, ready to go home. We are not here to bargain. We’re here to find solutions,” he told reporters on the concluding day of the conference.

For small island states like Tuvalu, where climate change is an existential threat now rather than a future risk, this difference is significant. It is the politics of survival.

Several Concrete Results

Ireland and Tuvalu will co-host a second conference, ensuring continuity and signalling a conscious North-South partnership. A dedicated science panel will support countries and regions in their transition away from fossil fuels. Three work streams were established: pathways to transition away from fossil fuels; decarbonisation of trade balances; and new financial mechanisms to finance the transition.

These are not symbols for deliverables. They went to the core of the politics of dependence on fossil fuels.

The biggest challenge in climate politics is no longer to prove that climate change is real. It’s trying to work out how countries that rely on fossil fuel revenues can survive the transition without economic collapse, social unrest or widening inequality.

That means dealing with debt, subsidies, tax systems, labour transitions, industrial planning and trade balances. The focus on financial architecture in Santa Marta is a sign of awareness on the part of the participants.

The debate over fossil fuel subsidies was particularly important. Ministers emphasised the need for transparency on the location of fossil fuel incentives, revenues and dependencies within national economies. This is important because fossil fuels are not just an energy issue. They’re so entrenched in national budgets, banking systems, foreign policy and power structures.

The war in the Middle East, the disruption of oil supplies and the general insecurity of world energy have hastened the need for change. But unlike previous oil crises, this time renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper compared to fossil fuels, and electric vehicles are scaling up very fast.

Participants argued that the war has revealed not the need for more oil drilling, but the danger of fossil fuel dependence itself.

“The war really opened up peoples’ eyes to how fragile the fossil fuel system is,” a speaker said. “And this war comes at a time when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels.

This shifts the transition from a strictly environmental imperative to a strategic economic and security priority.

Action on climate is no longer simply about saving the planet. It’s about stabilising economies, reducing geopolitical vulnerability and avoiding the financial risks of stranded fossil assets.

The reason this is a powerful shift is that finance ministers tend to move faster than environment ministers.

Another remarkable strength of Santa Marta was its insistence on being inclusive. Indigenous Peoples, parliamentarians, peasants, women, NGOs and even children were brought into the heart of the conversation.

“This is a new climate democracy, where governments are no longer the only actors making climate decisions,” said Irene Velez Torres, Director of the Colombian National Environmental Agency.

One of the strongest interventions at the conference came from Indigenous representatives, who warned that a clean energy transition without land justice would simply mean another wave of colonial extraction. Their declaration rejects a future where extraction of fossil fuels is replaced by mining for transition minerals, mega dams or industrial projects imposed on Indigenous lands without consent.

“If we are not part of building the just transition and the phase-out of fossil fuels, it will not be just,” they said in a joint declaration at the end of the conference on April 29.

This revealed one of the deepest contradictions in global climate policy: many governments speak of a green transition but continue with extractive models under a new name.

Indigenous leaders demanded free, prior and informed consent, legal recognition of the rights to their territories, direct access to climate finance and protection for land defenders at risk of criminalisation and violence.

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative continues to be central. Tuvalu has been one of its earliest supporters, demanding a legally binding international framework to stop expansion and ensure a fair phase-out of fossil fuels.

Talia welcomed the treaty for raising the bar in terms of moral pressure and providing governments with clearer information but warned against limiting the whole transition conversation to one mechanism.

He said: “The treaty is an initiative. We want to look at all other initiatives so that we have a fair, balanced outcome.”

That’s a sign of strategic maturity. One treaty will not kill the most profitable industry in modern history.

These include UNFCCC processes, national policy, fossil fuel treaty mechanisms, regional declarations, central bank reforms and the involvement of financial institutions.

Participants highlighted China’s green lending strategies and said banking systems need to stop rewarding fossil fuel dependence and instead finance transition at scale.

Likewise, Pacific island nations are advocating for regional “fossil fuel-free zones”, supported by new declarations and intergovernmental task forces. These efforts matter because regional leadership often moves quicker than global consensus.

Hence, the choice of Tuvalu as the venue for the next conference is very significant. It’s shifting the discussion from the diplomatic capitals to one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. It forces political leaders to confront the human reality of rising seas, disappearing land and threatened sovereignty.

History in the Making

Santa Marta won’t solve the fossil fuel crisis. It doesn’t stop new drilling. It does not yet impose binding obligations.But it may have done something more important, which is to make fossil fuel phase-out politically discussable at scale. For years, people saw talking straight about ending oil, gas, and coal as too radical, too unrealistic, or too politically dangerous. In Santa Marta it became the focus of the room.

If this coalition grows from 60 to 100 countries, if its outcomes feed into COP31 and national climate plans, if the finance systems start to shift, and if the Pacific conference deepens the legal momentum, then Santa Marta could be remembered not as a one-off summit but as the moment when climate diplomacy finally stopped treating the symptoms and started tackling the disease. That would be history.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Frank Connolly, head of communications for Ireland's SIPTU, speaks to participants and is recorded by Dublic Community TV on Jun. 24, 2013, as part of the OURMedia conference. Credit: Jane Regan/IPS

By Jane Regan
DUBLIN, Ireland, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

Communications scholars from around the world deplored the global financial crisis and called on their peers to take more active roles in the search for solutions at a recent four-day conference in Dublin, Ireland.

Over 1,400 professors and researchers from the International Association for Media and Communications Research (IAMCR) spoke, listened, lamented and argued at its Jun. 25-29 annual conference, this year centred on the theme “Crises, ‘Creative Destruction’ and the Global Power and Communication Orders.”

The term “creative destruction” comes from conservative Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, who borrowed the idea from Karl Marx.

“I proposed the theme,” DCU Professor Paschal Preston, head of the organising committee, told IPS. “I chose it to get away from the media-centred and media-centric analyses… Scholars are too often ignoring the growing and glaring failures of democracy in the West.”

The Dublin conference attracted a record number of academic papers from over 80 countries. At the plenaries and in the panels, academics spoke about the challenges facing the media, communications scholars, and the planet as a whole.

Anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist speakers

Ireland’s President Michael B. Higgins opened the conference speaking Irish and then switching to English. The former head of Ireland’s Labour Party lamented the fact that media consumers get more and more “formulised, homogenised content” and criticised the concentration of media ownership at the global level by mostly U.S. corporations.

“We don’t even know which conglomerate owns which media,” Higgins told the audience.

Later in the week, scholars from Africa, Europe and the U.S. challenged the assembled academics – perhaps half of whom came from Europe and North America – to get out of the classroom and grapple with the crises facing the planet.

In a talk delivered via internet, University of Cape Town Professor Francis Nyamnjoh noted that the crisis scaring Western Europe is nothing new for those in Africa or Latin America.

“As a 50-year-old African I am used to life as a constant crisis,” he said.

Annabelle Sreberny, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a former president of IAMCR, said the world is facing “many crises… the academy is in crisis and indeed our democracies are in crisis.”

Sreberny, whose recent research focused on the U.S. government-manufactured Stuxnet computer worm, condemned the U.S. and British “cyber-military industrial complex”.

Speaking later to IPS, she warned of “the dark side of the internet”.

“I think that academics in this field, who have worked through a great period of ‘cyber-utopianism,’ need to take seriously the revelations and hypocrisy of our governments,” the professor said.

University of Oregon sociologist John Bellamy Foster was among several speakers on panels that discussed the environmental crisis. Editor of the New York-based Monthly Review and author of several books, Foster said the capitalist system “is falling apart” and urged academics to open their minds to alternatives.

“There is no existing alternative – we have to create it,” he said. “Capitalism isn’t an alternative unless you think the destruction of the species is an alternative.”

A day later, U.S.-based Professor Jodi Dean echoed his call

In a talk on what she calls “mass personalised media” – Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms – the professor and author from Hobart and William Smith Colleges urged scholars to think more critically. Explaining her theory of “communicative capitalism”, Dean explained how social media obfuscate class while intensifying individualism, and said they are not “free”.

“We pay with attention, and the cost is focus,” Dean told her audience.

Calls for new theory, renewed engagement

The IAMCR was founded in 1957, with the blessing of UNESCO, and is both an academic and an advocacy organisation, but some in Dublin voiced criticisms. At several sessions, participants called on the association to take more proactive stances on the government spying scandals and other issues.

Stefania Milan, of Tilburg University in The Netherlands, was one of several who noted the growing influence of corporate funding on universities and the fact that in the U.S., full-time professors are being replaced by part-time teachers and by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Several studies peg the number of courses taught by adjuncts in the U.S. at about 70 percent, with Europe following close behind. Milan urged the IAMCR to speak out.

“We need to be an organisation that takes sides,” Milan said at a session called to examine IAMCR’s future.

At another forward-looking panel, this one called to “rethink” communication theory, scholars from Jamaica, China and India urged theorists to look beyond Western theory. Among the speakers was Pradip Thomas, from the University of Queensland, who said the global capitalist crisis “offers us an opportunity to deal with the underbelly: communication capitalism.”

Hopeton Dunn, director of the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, told IPS he organised the discussion in order to look at the “conceptual and theoretical crisis” of the field.

“There is a major gap between what is happening in the poor countries and the analysis taking place that is informed by thinkers in the rich countries,” he said. “The Academy is not playing enough of a role in addressing the real needs of real people.”

Crisis dominates

Panels, book launch parties and even some of the music at the IAMCR were dominated by the “crisis” theme. A song by Irish singer Clara Sidine, who entertained one evening, was accompanied by images of Rolex watches, mansions and roulette wheels, followed by photos of foreclosed houses and boarded-up shops.

Sidine told the crowd that Ireland’s economic crisis had inspired her to write “What’s a Boy To Do?” about a month ago.

Last week, Ireland’s government announced the economy had slipped back into recession. Ireland’s official unemployment rate stands at about 14 percent, and the state has one of the highest debts compared to GDP in Europe, at 118 percent.

“Ireland has gone from being the neoliberal pin-up to ‘failed state’ or bankrupt state,” explained DCU’s Preston, whose area of specialisation is political economy. “The Irish people have been carrying huge burdens of debt, way beyond other countries.”

Preston’s own department has also felt the crunch. In the past four years, DCU’s School of Communications has shrunk from 25 to 20 full-time staff, he said, and everyone has had to accept 20-percent pay cuts.

Asked what might come out of the IAMCR conference, the professor said he hoped it would help create “a more engaged community of communications scholars.”

“We need to link media issues to the deeper and structural crises of democracies in our societies,” he said.