Brazil's Cop 30 presidency presenting its international roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels right before the start of the UN Cop 31 climate summit has helped put a spotlight on the topic during talks this week.
The Cop 30 presidency pledged to create the roadmap after the 2025 summit in Brazil ended without a deal on the topic despite early momentum.
One role of the roadmap is to ensure countries remember the Cop 28 consensus on transitioning away from fossil fuels, Cop 30 president Andre Correa do Lago said.
The Cop 30 presidency's goal with the roadmap was to "break it down into concrete steps" and organize them, from assessing each country's dependence on fossil fuels to implementation, Cop 30 chief executive Ana Toni said.
UK climate representative Rachel Kyte lauded the roadmap for "taking the expression ‘transition away from fossil fuels', which risked becoming nothing more than a slogan, and turning it into a planning principle".
Attention is shifting to whether Cop 31, taking place in Antalya, Turkey, can translate that momentum into national action.
Kathryn McCallum, the strategy director at Climate Action Network Australia, called on fossil fuel roadmaps to be integrated into the second global stocktake, a measurement of progress towards the Paris climate agreement.
Many parties are calling for Australia and Turkey — who share the summit's presidency duties — to take Brazil's work forward, she said.
Turkey should use its convening power "to get governments to commit to stronger national action to phase out fossil fuels, including developing national roadmaps for that transition," Greenpeace Turkey's climate energy campaigner Emel Alpay said.
The head of political strategy at non-profit 350 Andreas Sieber expects other countries, such as the UK, to at least start announcing their intents to produce national roadmaps during Cop 31.
France, the Netherlands and Germany were among the largest countries to publish national roadmaps before Cop 31, with Finland doing so this week.
Hard conversations
Brazil has not published a national plan yet but has laid out guidelines to develop one and given itself around one year to publish it.
Critics say Brazil is taking too long to publish its own national plan, but Sieber does not see that as an issue. "Better later and well done than rushed", he said. "Faster would be better, but I think the real questions need to address the fossil [fuel] expansion. And that will understandably not be an easy conversation."
Brazil is one of the top 10 global oil producers, producing nearly 4.7mn b/d in September, according to its hydrocarbons regulator, and with plans to hike that to 4.9mn b/d by 2030, according to its energy research bureau.
Climate minister Joao Paulo Capobianco says that will not interfere in the national plan.
"We understand what these transitions require of us, and we know that we need to move forward," he said.
The different timelines for Brazil's domestic plan and the Cop 30 presidency's international roadmap are not necessarily contradictory, according to Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at Brazilian climate umbrella group Observatorio do Clima. The international roadmap is intended to encourage countries to produce national plans, meaning Brazil's domestic roadmap was always likely to come later, he said.
But the domestic delay still reflects the political difficulty of defining Brazil's own transition. Angelo pointed to Brazil's presidential elections this year and disagreements among ministries over the roadmap's guidelines as drags on the process.
Marta Salomon, a senior specialist at climate policy think-tank Talanoa, found it worrisome that the energy ministry — who she says was key to the plan's delay — will now oversee publishing it.
"We will have the national roadmap by the end of 2027, when the planet will be even closer to exceeding 1.5ºC of warming," she said.
