In April, 57 countries representing around one-third of global GDP gathered in Santa Marta to launch an initiative: Nations of the world need to develop roadmaps for transitioning away from fossil fuels. That the initiative was co-convened by Colombia, one of the world's largest coal exporters, is the point. Roadmaps are not a demand made of producer countries. They are a tool producer countries are building.
These roadmaps bridge the gap between ambition and implementation, but to do that, they need to match the complexity of the multi-stakeholder nature of fossil fuel dependence. As more and more countries develop their plans to phase out fossil fuels, the importance of systems design cannot be overstated.
Any climate action advocate can give you the targets that we need to meet to avert the climate crisis. Emission reduction rates, global temperature limits, and net-zero dates are all well-known factors. But none of them explain how we get there. Targets are not a theory of success. Roadmaps are. To answer that, awareness and ambition need to be translated into action and implementation plans.
This means that 2026 is the year of turning ambition into implementation. The tools are all available; the question is how to make them scale.
The Implementation Era
These initiatives demonstrate clearly that the ambition and awareness are there, but the implementation is lacking.
The barrier is no longer aggregate capital. Clean energy investment is reaching $2.2 trillion in 2026, nearly double fossil fuel investment. The barrier is where that capital lands, and what it is asked to do once it gets there. Africa is home to roughly a fifth of the world's people and attracts a low single-digit share of global clean energy investment. The missing piece of the energy transition puzzle is systems design. Grids and societies need to be redesigned around the phase-out of fossil fuels. Without involvement from the whole ecosystem, pledges remain just that. This is what the COP30 presidency and the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands realized. What is needed now is to put pen to paper and develop action plans, rather than more demonstrations of political will. And national roadmaps are just the tool for that.
Mapping the Energy Transition
A roadmap takes climate action from ambition to economic feasibility. Some countries have already proven that they are taking the fossil fuel transition seriously. For example, France announced a transition roadmap soon after the conference in Santa Marta, outlining explicit end-of-consumption targets for coal by 2030, oil by 2045, and fossil gas by 2050. Thanks to its robust investments in firm, clean energy in the past, France can comfortably set targets to electrify its industries despite a projected 30% increase in electricity consumption by 2035. 
Benoît Faraco, France's Special Envoy for Climate Negotiations, announced the country's roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels during the Santa Marta Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels.
France's dates are France's dates. A country where a third of the population lacks reliable electricity is answering a different question, and its roadmap should look different. That is the design principle, not a loophole. The economies with the deepest capital markets and the largest historical emissions move first and fastest, and the roadmap's job is to make sure no country is asked to trade development for decarbonization.
For these roadmaps to succeed, they must address how fossil-free systems will fit into our modern society. Four success conditions stand out:
- Energy abundance: Phasing out fossil fuels is not sufficient unless clean alternatives are available, and abundance means different things in different places. In wealthy economies it means meeting rising demand as industry, transport, and buildings, without price spikes, blackouts, or industries relocating across borders. Elsewhere it means first-time access for people who have never had a reliable grid. Both are abundance problems, and a roadmap that solves only the first is not a global roadmap.
- Finance: A technical roadmap without a financing plan is incomplete. This extends beyond domestic funding. For a global transition to happen, finances also need to flow from the Global North to the Global South.
- Just Transition: Phase-outs cannot succeed without public support. For a transition roadmap to survive between elections, it must be fair, just, and address public sentiment. Examples include explicit affordability guarantees, workforce transition plans, and tangible improvements in the local environment and economies.
Growing the Coalition
Ultimately, a global transition away from fossil fuels needs more than the countries already on board. The major emitters absent from Santa Marta (the U.S., China, and Russia come to mind) and the national oil companies that control most of the world's reserves need to be part of the process. Roadmaps are, at this stage, demonstrations of what can be done and tools for predicting the market. Going forward, they must also include accountability architecture, aimed squarely at the actors most responsible for the transition.
A second group is absent for a different reason. Countries that lack the fiscal space, the grid capacity, or the technical staff to draft a roadmap are not holding the transition back. They are waiting on the finance and capacity that roadmaps are meant to unlock. Treating those two absences as the same problem is how climate diplomacy loses the room.
The Santa Marta movement is now an integral part of international climate diplomacy. The dialogues and roadmaps feed into the official UNFCCC COP process, and more governments are expected to join the coalition before the next conference in Tuvalu in 2027, where the progress on roadmaps is to be evaluated. The movement's next victory won't be a pledge. It will be the first country that phases out fossil fuels while keeping energy robust, just, and affordable, and shows other economies a path they can adapt on their own terms. That is what success looks like, and roadmaps are how we get there.
