Women's Climate Conversations 2026: Beyond the fossil fuel deadlock

Start: 2026-09-01 12:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)

End: 2026-09-01 13:45:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)

Event Type: Virtual
A virtual link will be communicated before the event.

Host contact info info@womensclimatecongress.com

Event publicity image with Title, time and date of event, images and names of speakers and WCC logo> The image also has a background featuring First Nations artwork
Canva
BEYOND THE FOSSIL FUEL DEADLOCK

Building an international roadmap for a just transition

In April 2026, while some of us where attending Women Deliver in Melbourne, on the other side of the world Colombia and The Netherlands hosted the first international Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. The conference, hosted in Santa Marta, Colombia convened 57 countries and more than 1000 stakeholders to advance global commitments made under the Paris Agreement.

At COP28 in Dubai, the international community recognised formally for the first time, the need to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems - but practical cooperation on how to do so has remained problelmatic. At COP30 in Brazil, formal global consensus on a fossil fuel phase-out text was omitted from the primary UN agreement.

To counter this deadlock, Brazil announced that it would pursue other multilateral processes outside of the formal UNFCCC process to advance action among countries and stakeholders. The international challenge was taken up by Colombia and The Netherlands to co-host the Santa Marta conference as an innovative, inclusive, and action-oriented space to help countries move towards more sustainable, sovereign and secure energy systems.

After a few months of intensive online convenings to gather input from 14 societal groups,1 over 5 days at Santa Marta ministers and envoys from across the world sat in circles in small meeting rooms to have open and frank conversations about the barriers they face in transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy.
Parlticipants wrote that this format was 'refreshing', and 'highly successful'. Panama’s special representative on climate change, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, was reported to say that the format was 'groundbreaking', adding:

“as the workshop started, I realised there were ministers, envoys, civil society leaders and Indigenous people. They put us in a format where we could not open our computers, so we had to speak from our minds and our hearts. That completely flipped my perception. That kind of space I haven’t seen in my 10-year history with the UNFCCC.”

Join Dr Janet Salisbury, Founder of Women's Climate Congress, in conversation with Tzeporah Berman, Founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty inititative (who will be joining from Vancouver), and Dr Amanda Cahill, Founder of The Next Economy in Australia, to delve into what this conference really means for the international phase out of fossil fuels and the path to a just transition, and what the next important steps are to maintain momentum.

Further information and speaker bios are on our website at:

https://womensclimatecongress.com/womens-climate-conversations.

1 Subnational governments, academia, social movements, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), trade unions, parliamentarians, the private sector, multilateral development banks, Indigenous Peoples, peoples of African descent, peasants, children and youth, women and diversities and faith-based groups.

Donations welcome to support these events
WCC is a volunteer-led organisation with big ambition! While this is a free event to support inclusion, a donation to support our work would be appreciated.
Recommended donation: $10–20

Donate here
Event by
Gravatar
Janet Salisbury
Yarralumla, Australia
Sponsored by
Wcc-logo-transparent(march21)_(002)
Women's Climate Congress