The Santa Marta conference marked a hopeful step in global climate diplomacy, launching a dedicated science panel for the fossil fuel transition. But as this new institution takes shape, important questions arise about legitimacy and whose knowledge guides the path towards a just transition, says Niklas Wagner in our interview with him.
A first-of-its-kind conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels just took place in Santa Marta. What happened, and why does it matter?
The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, held in Santa Marta, Colombia, from 24 to 29 April 2026, was a genuinely significant moment in international climate diplomacy. Co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, the conference brought together representatives of more than 57 countries, including Germany and the EU, scientists and civil society to discuss how to move beyond fossil fuels in practice.
The conference emerged from frustration over decades of not substantially tackling fossil fuel phaseout in climate negotiations. Given the logic of the Paris Agreement relying on ambitious climate contributions, Santa Marta represents a moment of cautious hope. However, institutionally anchored outside of the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Santa Marta needs broader global participation to succeed, both in terms of country participation and the inclusion of different forms of knowledge.
One of the first outcomes was the launch of a new Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition — SPGET. What is it?
SPGET was formally launched on 24 April 2026 at the Teatro Santa Marta and will be co-chaired by Cameroonian economist Vera Songwe, German climate economist Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and Brazilian energy systems professor Gilberto Jannuzzi of UNICAMP. It was convened by Johan Rockström and Carlos Nobre, and will be hosted at the University of São Paulo. Its mandate is to produce annual, nationally relevant scientific guidance on fossil fuel phaseout, faster and more action-oriented than the IPCC‘s multi-year cycle, and explicitly independent from intergovernmental approval of its recommendations.
Importantly, the launch of SPGET did not happen in a vacuum but happened next to a presentation of the Synthesis Report workstream of the Academic Dialogue to the Santa Marta conference where academics presented 12 Action Insights for the Santa Marta Process. Ideally, this process will be linked institutionally with the SPGET.
What possibilities does this panel open up — and what will determine its credibility?
SPGET addresses a real gap. Dedicated, knowledge infrastructure for equitable energy transition has been missing and institutionally anchoring the panel at the University of São Paulo and drawing co-chairs from Africa and Latin America are meaningful signals for a commitment for better science. Colombia’s Environment Minister Irene Vélez Torres called for at the opening ceremony. She invoked the need for postcolonial and intersectional science, open to dialogue with indigenous, rural, and popular knowledges alongside conventional expertise – calling explicitly for a revolution in epistemology.
How this institutionalises remains obscure, however. And hence, civil society voices and Guardian journalist Nina Lakhani have already noted concerns about the lack of transparency in the manner the panel was introduced, raising questions about whether SPGET will genuinely pluralise the knowledge base for the energy transition. For full credibility of the panel, these concerns merits serious engagement from the panel’s founders.
SPGET is explicitly designed to be independent from intergovernmental approval. Is this beneficial for the legitimacy of the panel?
Scientific independence from political filtering can be genuinely valuable, the IPCC process has shown how governments can water down inconvenient findings in the so-called summary for policy makers. But independence comes with a trade-off. Energy transitions involve deeply normative choices: which technologies to deploy, which stakeholders and communities bear costs, how fast to phase out fuels that underpin public revenues in developing economies. These are not questions science alone can resolve. They require structured deliberation involving governments, civil society, and affected communities. Who decides the pace, who absorbs the fiscal shock, which workers are retrained first, these are political choices that affected communities and citizens, not scientists, must ultimately own. A panel that builds in genuine participation mechanisms from the outset will be far better placed to secure the buy-in from countries not yet in the coalition that a globally credible and just phaseout ultimately requires.
Niklas Wagner is a researcher in the Environmental Governance department at IDOS and a member of the CLIMDEV project. He works on questions of knowledge in global environmental governance processes.
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