The first draft of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels could be ready by a global summit on the topic in Colombia in April, according to UN Cop 30 climate summit president Andrea Correa do Lago, who plans to ask Opec, the Paris-based IEA and other groups to contribute.
The creation of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels became a central topic at Cop 30, held last month in Brazil's north, after Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called for one during a leaders' summit days before Cop 30 began.
The issue received backing from just over 80 countries but was ultimately left out of any final texts. At the closing of the summit, the Brazilian presidency promised to deliver a roadmap by the start of Cop 31 — which will be held in Turkey next year — but the work will be done outside of official negotiations.
"We will probably have a lot done before the Colombia meeting", Correa do Lago said in a televised interview on 28 November. Colombia and the Netherlands announced before Cop 30 that they would co-host an international conference on the just transition away from fossil fuels on 28-29 April, and Correa do Lago said that the work on the roadmap would benefit from the event.
The Cop 30 presidency will create a working group that will be in contact with international energy agencies already looking into the topic, he added, "because energy is a delicate issue from a geopolitical and economic point of view." Correa do Lago plans to tap the IEA, Opec, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the Global Biofuels Alliance and the International Solar Alliance to help the working group, among others.
"We want to put together something that brings their work together, because you already have many people working on this, but not as a unified whole as we intend to do," he said. The presidency wants to "spark a debate on the topic in a very different way than it has been handled so far", he said.
Fossil fuel producers such as Russia, India and Saudi Arabia pushed back heavily on including a roadmap in Cop 30 texts, while some developing countries still looking to rely on their oil resources, such as Mexico and Guyana, Kenya and Sierra Leone, supported the idea of a roadmap, as long as it takes into account national circumstances and it promotes in a just, equitable and orderly transition.
Instead of the roadmap, Cop 30 parties agreed on the launch of a "global implementation accelerator ", and the "Belem Mission to 1.5". These voluntary initiatives are aimed at "enabling ambition and implementation" of countries' climate plans and at keeping the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C temperature rise limit within reach. This refers to the more ambitious goal of the Paris accord — to hold the global temperature increase to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and preferably to no more than 1.5°C.
