Jonathan SchofieldIt’s been a fortnight since the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels finished on 29 April, and I had forgotten to check in on how it developed after the 26th.
So my thanks to Daisy Dunne of #carbonBrief for writing up a report
…Good to read of Panama’s special representative on climate change, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, saying:
“I’m going to be honest. [At] first I was like: ‘What the f*ck am I doing here? I don’t know where this is going’. But then, 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.”
— Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez of Panama.
Reporter, Daisy, adds that
“All of the sessions were held under the Chatham House rule, meaning discussions were not attributable to individual speakers to encourage more open debate.”
Details on the Conference’s views of the takeaways are in the PDF at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/68dc91a7e566d74a91e8e22d/t/69f2979327f294060a2cb53d/1777506195819/TAFF+Conference_Co-host+Takeaways_DEF.pdf
…Some people who featured in the governance of the Conference’s Science Panel – some I already knew of and some new to me:
Dr Johan Rockström
Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PICIR)
Dr Carlos Nobre,
Amazon rainforest researcher, University of São Paulo
Dr Vera Songwe
economist and climate finance, Cameroon
Prof Ottmar Edenhofer
chief economist, PICIR
Prof Gilberto M Jannuzzi, professor of energy systems, Universidade Estadual de Campinas
…On 27 April, the Conference published ‘Insights from the Synthesis Report workstream of the Academic Dialogue’:
https://energy-transition-science.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/SMART-summary-en.pdf [pdf]
…The Insights summary includes a 12-point action plan, with points assigned to each of 3 scopes:
A. Overcoming economic dependence
B. Transforming supply and demand
C. Advancing international cooperation and climate diplomacy
…A. Overcoming economic dependence
1. Develop holistic gov plans to transition away from fossil fuels and dismantle legal, financial, and political barriers resulting from fossil fuel lock-in and entrenchment
2. Proactively protect livelihoods and workers through early retraining, skills development, and
community and regional redevelopment
3. Communicate fair, transparent, and evidence-based policies
4. Appeal to human values and wellbeing to convey the need to transition
…B. Transforming supply and demand:
5. Take immediate measures to prevent future emissions
6. Implement carbon pricing with international harmonisation and phase out fossil fuel subsidies
7. Establish enabling standards and monitoring requirements for fossil fuel transition targets and timetables
8. Implement harmonised fossil fuel supply levies to incentivise demand shifts and fund just transitions
…B. Transforming supply and demand (continued)
9. Leverage central banks’ financial and price stability mandates to reduce the financing costs of clean energy, electrification and enabling infrastructure
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C. Advancing international cooperation and climate diplomacy
10. Strengthen international cooperation on transitioning away from fossil fuels within and outside the UNFCCC
11. Integrate all forms of knowledge and developmenti imperatives in planning for just transitions
…C. Advancing international cooperation and climate diploma (continued)
12. Realign international legal frameworks to support just transitions away from fossil fuels
/summary ends.
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I’m glad this conference happened and will run again next year in Tuvalu.
On a purely technocratic note, my hope is that their web comms are better and rely less upon PDFs with very poor accessibility