Climate multilateralism, geopolitics, and the transition away from fossil fuels

As COP31 approaches, Professor Richard Beardsworth explores how plurilateral climate action can sustain progress on the transition away from fossil fuels when universal consensus reaches its limits

COP28 established a historic direction for international climate policy: ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner’ (Global Stocktake, para. 28(d)). The transition was kept off the agenda at COP29, but COP30 in Belém returned decisively to implementation, with the Brazilian presidency proposing a ‘transition roadmap’. The proposal, however, exposed the problem COP28 left unresolved. While parties had agreed on the direction of transition, geopolitical divisions prevented consensus on how fossil-fuel decline should be organised and accelerated. When the final decision omitted the roadmap, Colombia and the Netherlands convened the Santa Marta conference the following April, bringing willing states together outside the constraints of UNFCCC consensus, with its outcomes to be carried forward to COP31 by the COP30 presidency. Following my previous reflections on COP30 here, I want to ask what this more plural approach, and its development towards COP31, tells us about how climate multilateralism can advance where universal consensus cannot.

Santa Marta

At Santa Marta in April 2026, rather than seeking another universal agreement, 57 participating countries pursued plurilateral cooperation around three practical workstreams: national and regional fossil-fuel transition roadmaps; finance and investment to enable the transition; and producer-consumer cooperation. Participation was by invitation, but the conference emphasised practical action rather than formal negotiation, and, crucially, it was conceived not as an alternative to the UNFCCC but as a means of building momentum around it. A coordination group, including Colombia and the Netherlands and future conference hosts Tuvalu and Ireland, will maintain the process, while the conference outcomes have been passed to the Brazilian COP30 presidency as it develops its transition roadmap towards COP31. Santa Marta thus established a plurilateral process designed not to circumvent the UNFCCC but to influence the wider multilateral process from outside its formal negotiations.

Bonn

The first indication of how this strategy might work came, I suggest, at SB64 in Bonn in June 2026. The results were mixed. Santa Marta gained little formal institutional traction, reflecting the geopolitical divisions that had already frustrated agreement in Belém. The COP negotiating group, the Environmental Integrity Group (EIG), nevertheless explicitly welcomed the development of fossil-fuel transition roadmaps following Santa Marta, demonstrating that the initiative had entered the political conversation. Opposition was equally clear. The Arab Group rejected roadmaps developed outside the UNFCCC and resisted approaches that singled out sources of emissions. Bonn therefore reproduced the underlying divide: Santa Marta could generate political momentum among willing states, but it could not overcome opposition to institutionalising fossil-fuel transition within the consensus process. The result was political transmission – not inconsequential – but without substantial institutionalisation.

COP31

Preparations for COP31 suggest that this political transmission is now occurring through several overlapping processes rather than a single negotiating track. The Brazilian COP30 presidency continues to develop its roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF), informed by consultations since Belém, including the outcomes of Santa Marta, and intends to deliver it by COP31. The incoming Australian President of Negotiations, Chris Bowen, has gone further in connecting Santa Marta to COP31. Having met the Colombian and Dutch ministers, he has invited their input and undertaken to give the conference’s results space in the COP31 process. Türkiye, as COP31 host and President of the Action Agenda, is approaching transition differently again. Rather than placing fossil-fuel transition at the centre of a formal negotiating agenda – which remains politically a non-starter – it has made the clean-energy transition a priority of its Action Agenda, including an ambition to increase electricity’s share of final energy demand from just over 23% today to 35% by 2035. Taken together, these COP presidencies appear to be seeking to align different forms of action – roadmap development, formal negotiation and implementation – without forcing a negotiating agenda that would encounter immediate geopolitical resistance. COP31 consequently looks less like an attempt to negotiate a fossil-fuel phaseout than a test of how to implement the political direction formally agreed at COP28. The challenge comes as disagreement over the means of transition becomes more divisive, amid rising material stakes and deepening geopolitical fragmentation.

Climate multilateralism

Three conclusions follow. First, fossil-fuel transition is increasingly a political, not only an economic, process. As transition moves from ambition to implementation, questions of production, finance, trade and development sharpen long- standing distributional conflicts, themselves increasingly entangled with geopolitical division. Second, climate multilateralism is consequently becoming more plural, combining coalitions of willing states, presidency initiatives, implementation processes and universal negotiations. In this context, COP31 raises an important question: can these different sites of leadership and action reinforce one another sufficiently to advance transition where universal consensus alone cannot? Third, this pluralism does not diminish the UNFCCC. It remains the indispensable arena in which initiatives encounter political resistance, different forms of action are brought into relation, and international progress towards fossil-fuel transition is ultimately measured.

The immediate tests come at the Pre-COP in Fiji in October and COP31 in Antalya. But the larger test is of climate multilateralism itself. Rather than a centralised process succeeding or failing through universal consensus alone, an increasingly plural multilateralism is emerging: initiatives develop across different sites, coalitions and forms of leadership while remaining anchored in the universal UNFCCC process. Its effectiveness will depend on whether political direction can be sustained across this plural landscape amid deepening geopolitical division. Pluralism may therefore prove not a retreat from climate multilateralism, but the means of sustaining it.