Santa Marta’s Fossil Fuel Exit Plan Puts Scotland’s Drilling U-Turn on the Clock

In the week Scotland’s voters returned the Scottish National Party (SNP) to power with a softened position on North Sea drilling, ministers from 57 countries met on the Caribbean coast and agreed on something the United Nations climate talks have ducked for three decades: an explicit plan to move the world off oil, gas and coal. The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands in Santa Marta from April 24 to 29, ended with national roadmap commitments, a new science panel and a 2027 follow-up in Tuvalu. It also ended with a question pointed straight at Edinburgh.

Scotland’s climate credibility was built on hosting the 2021 Glasgow climate summit and pledging finance for loss and damage. The same week Santa Marta delegates agreed on a global exit ramp, Holyrood ministers told Aberdeen voters new drilling could resume if it passes a climate-compatibility test. Both things cannot stay true.

What Santa Marta Produced

The Colombia-Netherlands conference was the first ministerial-level meeting in the history of climate diplomacy to take the words “transition away from fossil fuels” and ask what governments were willing to do about them. Delegations from roughly one third of the global economy agreed three workstreams. The first is the development of national and regional fossil-fuel transition roadmaps, designed to plug into countries’ Paris Agreement climate plans. The second is financial reform aimed at fossil subsidies and the debt traps that lock producing nations into hydrocarbon dependence. The third tackles trade rules that today carry fossil exposure into every supply chain.

Two institutions came out of the meeting. A new independent science panel on the energy transition, with 50 to 100 researchers and a secretariat at the University of São Paulo, will publish modelling and pathway analysis on the same cycle as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A coordinating group will hold the workstreams between conferences so the next host country does not start from a blank page.

Who Showed Up, Who Did Not

The guest list reveals the limit of what Santa Marta could be. China, Russia, the United States and India were not invited, which means roughly 60 per cent of global emissions sat outside the room. The hosts framed this as a coalition of the willing rather than a universal negotiation. Inside the room, the spread was wider than the fossil-fuel-treaty endorser list suggests.

Attendees included representatives from Angola, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom and Vietnam, alongside the Pacific small-island states that have driven the treaty initiative for the past five years. Eighteen countries have now formally endorsed calls for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty (FFNPT, a binding-supply mechanism modelled on nuclear and ozone treaties). Civil-society endorsers include 194 sub-national governments, the World Health Organization and the Scottish Catholic Bishops Conference.

The notable presences:

• Norway and the United Kingdom, both major North Sea producers, sent delegations and accepted the closing declaration text.
• Nigeria and Angola, two of Africa’s largest oil exporters, joined the financial-reform workstream.
• Australia, which will run the COP31 negotiations in Antalya in November, used the meeting to road-test exit-language it hopes to revive at the formal UN talks.
• Tuvalu and Ireland were named as the 2027 co-hosts, an unusual pairing of a Pacific climate-frontline state and a European hydrocarbon importer.

Scotland’s Wavering at the Worst Moment

The Scottish National Party held on to 58 seats at the May 7 Holyrood election, seven short of a majority but inside a pro-independence bloc of 73 with the Scottish Greens. The campaign cost the party a clear position on North Sea oil. Mairi McAllan, the cabinet secretary for net zero, told a BBC Question Time audience in Aberdeen that new licences should be considered against both “climate compatibility” and “energy security, which is a moving picture”.

The 2023 Position

The SNP government’s policy, set out in the 2023 draft energy strategy, was a presumption against new exploration. That language hardened the Scottish position into one of the more ambitious in any oil-producing nation, on paper at least. It was the political cover that let Edinburgh argue for international climate finance and host events with Pacific delegations on terms of moral equivalence. It is also the position John Swinney, the first minister, has spent the last quarter visibly walking back.

What the Compatibility Test Actually Says

The climate compatibility checkpoint, designed under Westminster’s 2022 framework for offshore licensing, sets six tests on emissions, sector progress and global price exposure. The Climate Change Committee’s published view is that a strict reading of the checkpoint is incompatible with Scotland’s legislated 2045 net-zero target. If McAllan’s “evidence-led” doctrine means anything other than green-lighting new fields, the test must be tightened. If it does not, the Holyrood position converges with Westminster and with Reform UK, which won a bloc of seats on a maximise-the-North-Sea platform.

The Aberdeen Problem

Aberdeen South sits at the centre of the dispute. The North-East seats the SNP lost or barely held in May were the seats where the oil-services workforce is concentrated. The political calculation that produced McAllan’s softening is straightforward; the climate calculation it ignores is the one Santa Marta delegations were modelling all of April.

Three Decades of COP Stalling

The Santa Marta outcome only reads as historic against the failure pattern of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, the 1992 treaty that runs the COP meetings). Fossil fuels were absent from every COP decision text from 1995 until 2021, when Glasgow’s pact on coal squeezed in a “phase down unabated” line. The Dubai breakthrough at COP28 in 2023 produced the words “transitioning away”. The next two COPs failed to define them.

1. 2021, Glasgow (COP26): First explicit mention of fossil fuels in a COP outcome, limited to a “phase down” of unabated coal.
2. 2023, Dubai (COP28): Consensus text on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. No implementation detail.
3. 2024, Baku (COP29): Finance-year talks; no progress on phase-out language.
4. 2025, Belém (COP30): Twenty-four countries brought a Belém Declaration for fossil-fuel phase-out; the formal text watered it down.
5. 2026, Santa Marta: First standalone ministerial conference on transition, outside the COP process.

The pattern that prompted Colombia and the Netherlands to convene a parallel track was three decades long. It is also the pattern that gives the Santa Marta outputs an unusual status: they are diplomatic homework that COP31 will have to take a position on, whether or not the Antalya presidency wants to.

The Economics Are Already Shifting

The most concrete number to come out of Santa Marta was Colombia’s own modelling. The hosts presented analysis showing Colombia can cut energy emissions 90 per cent below 2015 levels by 2050 with annual investment of $10 billion (about £8 billion), generating up to $23 billion in annual savings by mid-century. The arithmetic is not unique to Colombia. Similar studies for the United Kingdom, Norway and Australia produce comparable net-positive paths, with the savings concentrated in fuel imports, health costs and avoided climate damage.

The cost of staying the course is also documented. Global insured losses from climate-linked disasters topped $150 billion last year, the third consecutive year above that mark. The actuarial signal flashing through the reinsurance sector is reaching corporate treasurers via rising premia. Ben Wilson, director of public engagement at the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF, the development arm of the Scottish Catholic Bishops Conference), put the moral and fiscal case in the same sentence.

The transition ahead is not just technical, it is deeply political. It requires standing up to powerful vested interests that benefit from delay and choosing instead to invest in a different kind of prosperity, one rooted in sustainability, resilience and justice.

Wilson, who also serves as international policy lead for Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS, the Scottish climate coalition), has put SCIAF’s name to the Bishops’ endorsement of the fossil-fuel treaty call. The economic argument he is making is increasingly being made by financial regulators as well.

Antalya and Funafuti: The Next Eighteen Months

COP31 opens in Antalya, Turkey, on November 9 and runs through November 20. Australia holds “exclusive authority” over the negotiations under an unusual co-presidency arrangement, with Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate minister, leading the talks and Türkiye’s Murat Kurum holding the host role. Both have signalled they want the Santa Marta workstreams reflected in the COP31 cover decision. The fossil-producer bloc that blocked stronger language at COP30 will not have left Belém by the time Antalya opens.

The second Transitioning Away conference lands in Tuvalu in 2027, co-hosted with Ireland. By then, two things will be known that are not known now. Whether COP31 codified the Santa Marta roadmaps into a formal UN process, or treated them as a side track to be managed; and whether the Scottish Government turned up to Funafuti as the climate-leader it claims to be, or as a North Sea producer trying to keep two stories running at once.

If McAllan’s compatibility doctrine produces actual licence rejections in the next twelve months, Scotland walks into the 2027 conference with credibility intact and a North Sea phase-out plan that can be exported. If it produces approvals, Edinburgh arrives in Tuvalu with the same problem London has, and the door that opened at Santa Marta starts to close.