Nearly 60 nations hailed progress in the fight to exit fossil fuels as a breakaway conference wrapped up in Colombia on Wednesday -- but now face the harder work of turning words into action.
Ministers and envoys gathered in the coal port of Santa Marta in the hope of speeding the shift away from planet-heating fossil fuels and breaking a stalemate at the UN climate talks.
The conference was announced last year after nations failed to include an explicit reference to fossil fuels in the final deal reached at the UN COP30 climate summit in Brazil.
But organizers say it gained momentum after the US-Israel attacks on Iran ignited a global energy crisis -- underscoring the risks of reliance even as some nations looked to fossil fuels to plug supply gaps.
From tiny island states to European powers and emerging markets, nations attended the conference voluntarily after an effort to tackle fossil fuels head-on at last year's COP30 failed.
"Countries are taking steps," said Dutch Climate Minister Stientje van Veldhoven, whose country co-hosted.
"Everybody who is here is here because they want to move further than where they are right now, and they think that we can be stronger together.
"Together we can be stronger -- and we can go further." No binding commitments were expected but Colombian Environment Minister Irene Velez Torres said "big results" were achieved nonetheless.
She pointed to the creation of an expert panel of world-renowned climate scientists tasked with helping governments on their own transitions -- a daunting task in particular for developing nations dependent on oil and gas.
She thanked nations for coming together "to talk about the challenges (and) to talk about the taboos." "When they look back at us from the future...They will remember that we were there and working on the challenges of our time," she said.
The climate-threatened Pacific....
