In April 2026, Colombia and the Netherlands will bring together a “coalition of the willing” governments and partners in Santa Marta to advance a roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels. Carbon Tracker is contributing through the associated Global Science & Policy Conference, an academic convening immediately before the governmental conference that translates current research and ideas on transition pathways into roadmap options and evidence for the main intergovernmental discussions. 

What is the Santa Marta Process?

The Santa Marta Process is intended to move the fossil fuel phase-out debate from general commitments to practical pathways which can inform an overall roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. It will focus on the real-world challenges: supply and demand, economic and fiscal vulnerabilities, the role of state-owned enterprises, pathways to diversify and decarbonise, the key enabling condition of finance. The process links political decision-making with expert and civil society inputs so that the roadmap reflects both climate objectives and economic realities. 

Why it matters

The Santa Marta conference in April is unprecedented – the first time that a strong group of countries have come together actively to discuss how to transition away from fossil fuels, to meet the goals of the Paris agreement to limit warming. This conference marks the start of an ongoing Santa Marta Process to progress real-world transition, with a second conference envisaged for later this year. The challenge of the transition raises important questions that sit with finance ministries, economic planners, regulators and investors: fiscal reliance on fossil revenues, balance-of-payments exposure, sovereign credit dynamics, and the enabling conditions required to mobilise investment at scale. The Santa Marta Process provides a collaborative forum to address these constraints directly and to test policy and financing approaches against real-world geo-political and economic conditions. 

How Carbon Tracker is contributing

Carbon Tracker is a co-convener of the Global Science & Policy Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels hosted by the Universidad del Magdalena in Santa Marta on 24-25 April 2026. Carbon Tracker will work with universities and partner organisations to provide cutting-edge research and analysis that will inform the decisions governments and finance actors need to make. The purpose of this expert convening is to develop policy-relevant outputs – grounded in evidence – that can inform the roadmap discussions and strengthen the quality of the political decisions. 

What Carbon Tracker brings to the table

Carbon Tracker works at the intersection of the energy transition and capital markets. Our contribution will focus on three areas: 

  • Managed decline through a finance and economics lens – Analysis of how different fossil fuel phase-out pathways may affect sovereign credit, fiscal resilience and market pricing of transition risk, including implications for sovereign borrowing costs and access to investors’ capital. 
  • Diversification and transition finance enabling conditions – Evidence on the policy and investment conditions that support diversification and mobilise capital to fund clean energy infrastructure at scale, with a focus on the questions typically led by finance ministries, economic planners and regulators. 
  • Data and decision support – Scenario-based work (drawing on the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels as a policy tool) to help compare decline pathways. These scenarios are intended to demonstrate the implications of various routes to decabonisation and transition trade-offs, not to prescribe outcomes. 

About the Global Science & Academic Pre-Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels 

The Science Pre-Conference convenes scholars, think tanks and practitioners across economics, political science, law, sociology and related disciplines. It includes outcome-focused workstreams: self-organised workshops designed to produce practical outputs which will feed into the inter-governmental conference proper. Workstreams include central banking, fossil methane, roadmap architecture, labour transition and regional economic diversification, economics and data, and state-owned enterprises, among others. Co-conveners are Universidad del Magdalena; University of British Columbia; University of Sussex; Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Guangzhou; Carbon Tracker Initiative; Climate Strategies; IISD; and LINGO. 

Explore Carbon Tracker key resources relevant to the Santa Marta roadmap 

PetroStates of Decline: oil and gas producers face growing fiscal risks as the energy transition unfolds – fiscal exposure and sovereign risk
https://carbontracker.org/reports/petrostates-of-decline/ 

Switching to battery powered electric vehicles will save the Global South over $100 billion annually – demand-side disruption and oil demand implications
https://carbontracker.org/reports/electric-vehicles-in-the-global-south/ 

Tracking Emissions to Source – methodology underpinning the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels
https://carbontracker.org/reports/tracking-emissions-to-source/ 

Global Registry of Fossil Fuels – overview of the tool and how it is used
https://carbontracker.org/finally-we-have-a-global-registry-of-fossil-fuels/ 

 

For more information, contact the policy team financialpolicy@tracker-group.org