Two months ago, everyone was still wondering whether the First Conference for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels would carry the relevance it promised in Brazil. Would governments around the world care enough to show up after the excitement of COP30 had faded? In a world that seemed to be sinking into new wars with global consequences? Paradoxically, the escalating aggressions by the United States and Israel in Southwest Asia (Middle East) have shown the world exactly why we need to leave behind our dependence on fossil fuels. Entire communities have been destroyed, families buried under rubble, children killed, livelihoods erased, all in a region whose political fate has been shaped for over a century by the control of oil and gas. People in Palestine, Lebanon, and across the region are paying with their own lives for the world’s thirst for fossil fuels. These are not abstract arguments. They are the bombs that fall, the blockades that starve, the occupations that endure, all because fossil fuel wealth concentrates power in the hands of those willing to use violence to protect it. Not only do fossil fuels poison our planet, they fuel instability, deepen inequality, and tie our futures to volatile and unjust energy systems. Moving beyond fossil fuels is no longer a distant goal. It is a shared necessity. The response? Fifty-seven countries representing roughly a third of the global economy came together, signaling that the transition is not only possible but already underway. But what truly defined this conference was not just who showed up at the governmental level. It was who was finally let in. Indigenous peoples from around the world, trade unions, youth groups, academics, Afro-descendant communities, peasant associations, women and diverse identities, activists and NGOs, among others, engaged for the first time in a participation mechanism that actually listens to their voices and puts their demands on the table. And beyond the high-level spaces, communities were building, not just speaking. During both days of the Peoples Summit, 350.org with 32 organizations across Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands a Fair of Alternatives, showing that futures beyond fossil fuels are already here. Community leaders hosted a panel within the Peoples Summit space, and their voices fed into the final declaration. Frontline communities from all around the world had a voice on the Santa Marta conference It was no small thing to see Indigenous women leaders from Putumayo and Bolivia connecting over their shared concern about an energy transition being carried out without consultation in their territories, one that threatens to bring extractive models for copper and lithium that would gravely affect their environments and communities. But ready, too, to share models of community energy generation through biodigesters they have built themselves. Because communities around the world have not sat around waiting for their governments to act. They have thought of solutions and carried them out. That same spirit drove the Popular Assemblies we co-organized in three territories in Colombia and Ecuador, where affected communities named the crisis in their own terms. Two of the communities that led these Assemblies — Cesar sin Fracking and Alianza Libre de Fracking — attended the high-level Conference, including Yuvelis Morales Blanco, now a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. 350.org also held an organizing space toward a common Latin American campaign against fracking and LNG with leaders from Colombia, Argentina and Mexico. These connections between communities were perhaps the most powerful thread running through the conference. Activists from across the world linked militarization and the climate crisis in a country with more than 60 years of armed conflict, where multinationals like Glencore and Drummond have used armed groups to displace and kill local communities, seize their lands and waters, and leave surrounding populations in misery and fear. The Climate Justice Flotilla traveled across Caribbean islands still under Dutch colonial rule to bring their voices to this space — possibly the first time Aruba and Curacao had representation at a conference like this, even as the Netherlands, their colonial power, co-hosted while opposing a fossil fuel transition treaty. During the Santa Marta conference, activists and local communities blocked the entrance of one of the main coal ports in Latin America. It was also no small thing to see these same activists blockade one of the largest coal ports in Latin America with solar panels — Drummond’s port in Ciénaga. The action put the demands of affected communities front and centre: making polluters pay for the loss of land, biodiversity and life, and the need for a just transition. For local communities, doing something like this would mean enormous security risks — just weeks earlier, armed groups had kidnapped 25 fishermen from the community most affected by Drummond. But these young people from around the world used their foreign origins as a kind of shield, standing in solidarity with the communities of Ciénaga, Santa Marta, and all of Colombia affected by this multinational. Those same solar panels used in this action will now go to the communities most harmed by that coal port. So what did governments actually deliver? Let’s be clear: they could have been far more ambitious. The world is on fire, sometimes literally, and the political outcomes of this conference reflect cautious, small steps that do not match the urgency communities are living every day. Governments from 57 countries meet at the First Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels Conference, in Colombia That said, the fact that this conference happened at all, that it finally named fossil fuels as the root cause of climate chaos and created a dedicated space to address them outside of the pressures of formal COP negotiations, is itself a significant victory. Five concrete outcomes came out of the high-level segment: Continuity. A second conference has been announced for 2027, co-hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland, with the main event taking place in Tuvalu. And who better than our brothers and sisters from the Pacific nations, on the frontlines of climate chaos, to carry forward what started in Santa Marta and remind the world of the urgency? A coordination group has been established to ensure continuity between conferences, bringing together countries leading different alliances and initiatives on the fossil fuel transition, including the co-hosts of the first and second conferences. The outcomes will be handed over to the COP30 Presidency, shared ahead of the intersessional meetings in Bonn this June and formally presented at London Climate Action Week, with plans to bring them to the UN Secretary-General during New York Climate Week. The intention is to feed these results into the second Global Stocktake, making sure this process does not live in isolation from the UNFCCC. Three workstreams have been launched to identify concrete opportunities for cooperation: one focused on national roadmaps guided by the Science Panel, another on economic dependencies and financial architecture, and a third on aligning fossil fuel producers and consumers toward trade systems free of fossil fuels. These workstreams will remain open for countries to join or lead. A Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition will anchor the entire process in evidence rather than politics. Academics and scientists from around the world joined forces to ensure that science guides the process of leaving fossil fuels behind, and to help countries develop roadmaps aligned with the 1.5°C trajectory and to dismantle the legal, financial, and political barriers standing in the way. Are these outcomes enough? No. Are they the kind of bold, binding commitments that the scale of the crisis demands? Not even close. But in a world where the largest historical emitter has abandoned climate action entirely, where wars rage over the very resources we need to leave behind, the fact that 57 countries sat down, opened the doors to movements and communities, and committed to a sustained process is not nothing. It is the floor, not the ceiling, and it is up to all of us to push it higher. Communities everywhere will keep building the solutions their governments have been too slow to deliver. And the rest of us? We stay loud, stay connected, and keep showing up, because the transition has already begun, and it was never going to be led from the top. Because if this conference showed anything, it is that the transition is not only about energy systems. It is about power. The power of who gets to decide. Who benefits. Who is heard. And for perhaps the first time at this scale, the answer is beginning to shift. The Great Power Shift has started. Join us! The post Santa Marta was just the beginning appeared first on 350.