4 min readMay 7, 2026 05:39 PM IST
First published on: May 7, 2026 at 05:39 PM IST
Written by Chirag Dhara
In late April, Colombia and the Netherlands convened the First International Conference for the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. Designed as a forum for countries and stakeholders prepared to move faster than the consensus-bound UN process, Santa Marta sought to bypass the deadlock that has long plagued UN climate negotiations. Participating countries were expected to explore practical, legal, economic, and social pathways for winding down fossil-fuel dependence.
Whether Santa Marta can become more than diplomatic virtue signalling will depend heavily on today’s volatile geopolitics and economic undercurrents.
The US-Israel war on Iran has exposed, once again, the fragility of a global economy dependent on imported oil routed through militarised chokepoints. With shipping through the Strait of Hormuz repeatedly disrupted since March, households and businesses have suffered from inflation while the world’s top oil and gas companies have already banked eye-watering windfall war profits. Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, and ExxonMobil have been the biggest beneficiaries.
The energy shock has left us with two counteracting forces. On the one hand, it has pushed countries to speed up their transition beyond fossil fuels, supporting the goals of the Santa Marta conference. On the other hand, the primary opponents of climate action — Big Oil — are flush with billions in windfall war profits that, if history is any guide, will strengthen their capacity to lobby, litigate, and delay the transition.
But even if these well-funded headwinds are overcome, the green energy transition faces a structural pitfall of its own: Ecologically unequal exchange.
As nations push forward on solar panels, wind turbines, and EVs, they require vast amounts of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths. Many of these materials are heavily concentrated in the Global South. Ecologically unequal exchange occurs when wealthy nations appropriate these vital resources to power their green transitions, while disproportionately displacing the environmental and social costs of extraction onto developing countries.
Extraction is already devastating local ecologies with nickel mining in Indonesia linked to toxic hexavalent chromium in drinking water, lithium extraction causing extreme water shortages in Chile, and widespread artisanal cobalt mining in the Congo reliant on slavery-like labour conditions.
The irony is palpable. Workers and frontline communities in resource-rich developing countries stand to have their labour exploited and their environments destroyed, to manufacture the “green infrastructure” to sustain the lifestyles of the Global North.
A transition out of fossil fuels is non-negotiable, but a structurally unjust transition is unacceptable. The Global South must shape the terms of transition instead of being reduced to a supplier. This will require large Global South countries with political and economic heft to step up.
India was absent from Santa Marta, possibly on account of its advocacy for phase-down over phase-out of fossil fuels. However, India has both leverage and moral responsibility to push for a just transition. To this end, India must participate in the 2027 conference in Tuvalu to push for a transition that is rapid enough to meet the climate emergency, but equitable enough not to reproduce the hierarchies that caused it in the first place.
The writer is a climate and sustainability scientist at Krea University
