COP30 saw a major coalition of countries push for a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels. The intense debate marked a clear shift within the COP process from discussing the ‘what’ to confronting the ‘how’ of delivering an orderly, just transition away from fossil fuels. While the call for a roadmap did not make it into the final negotiated text, substantial progress was made. Now, Brazil’s role in building a Presidency-led process to deliver a roadmap which will report back to COP31 provides a critical opportunity to capture this momentum, leverage partnerships, and ensure a credible, country-led process that puts equity at its core.
Fossil fuels have historically been an almost taboo topic in COP negotiations. Coupled with the current geopolitical context, the launch of the roadmap at a COP is significant.
The stakes are clear. Energy accounts for more than three-quarters of total global emissions, making its decarbonisation central for a 1.5C pathway. Year-on-year record-breaking renewables deployment is now an unshakable reality, and the energy transition is happening, although still far too slowly. Without planning and cooperation, countries face growing risks of energy insecurity, economic volatility, and disruption.
This blog unpicks the dynamics of how COP30 built momentum on fossil fuels and what now needs to come next for the roadmap process.
The road to the roadmap: fossil fuels at past COPs
Part of the significance of the roadmap as a political outcome lies in how difficult it has been for COPs to deliver progress on fossil fuels at all. Discussions on a roadmap in Belém can be traced back to COP26 in Glasgow, where the commitment to coal phasedown represented the first reference to a fossil fuel in a UNFCCC decision text – nearly 30 years after the process first began. COP28 then saw this expand to the Global Stocktake agreement to ‘accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly and equitable manner’.
COP29 in Baku had a finance focus, but a perhaps unnoticed remark by President Lula at the preceding UNGA was significant, when he spoke of the need to end global dependency on fossil fuels. More detail emerged in Brazil’s NDC, published at COP29, which stated that the country would welcome international cooperation in defining schedules for the fossil fuel transition.
Calls for action on a roadmap were repeated by Environment Minister Marina Silva through 2025, including at the Global Ethical Stocktake during London Climate Action Week. At the UNGA meetings in New York, this call was picked up and amplified by the High Ambition Coalition and directly referenced by other countries (including the UK, Germany and Marshall Islands) at the UNSG High-Level Dialogue on Energy Transition.
E3G’s own analysis clearly identified the need for a roadmap as part of an overall package that included ambition to get back on track on mitigation, finance, adaptation and governance.
The road to the roadmap: building COP30 momentum
Despite this growing momentum, few were expecting President Lula’s opening remarks at the COP30 World Leaders Summit, where he explicitly called for a roadmap to overcome dependence on fossil fuels. Unpacking the negotiation dynamics that followed shows that COP30 delivered remarkable progress in a challenging context for the Presidency to now build on.
As delegates gathered in Belem, Lula’s remarks created the very real possibility that COP30 might address fossil fuels in the final negotiated text in a fashion not seen in its 30-year history.
The first week of COP saw rapidly growing momentum as a coalition of more than 80 countries openly pushed for action through events under the reshaped Action Agenda, and formal and informal submissions into the negotiating process.
Further momentum came from visibly growing support for the Colombia-led fossil fuel declaration launched later in the fortnight, with Netherlands, Australia, Cambodia, Kenya as major signatories.
Meanwhile government-led energy coalitions including the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, Powering Past Coal Alliance, the Clean Energy Transition Partnership and Coalition on Phasing out Fossil Fuel Incentives made the case for a roadmap and demonstrated real-world action, including through a major Presidency-chaired, multi-alliance, Action Agenda Ministerial, and further High-Level Dialogues and events.
This push was reflected in text under the first draft of the Mutirão package. At this point, concerns were growing that blockers were now taking note. This set the tone for the COP30 endgame, where it became clear that a consensus-based negotiated outcome would be challenging for Brazilian Presidency to deliver on, given the dynamics at play and the geopolitics surrounding the issue – yet a robust signal of political progress on fossil fuels was possible.
COP30 ultimately concluded with a final negotiated text which did not reference the roadmap. A new Global Implementation Accelerator will address the NDC gap, however, while the late addition of text giving it a role in implementing the UAE Consensus implicitly hands the COP30 and COP31 presidencies a mandate to advance the transition away from fossil fuels. This was crucially accompanied by the explicit announcement of the Presidency-led roadmap initiative, as a major political outcome of Belém, even if absent from the adopted decision.
There is now a clear thread of connection between the Presidency-led process to deliver a roadmap and the UNFCCC-mandated focus on accelerating efforts for 1.5C.
Delivering a roadmap process: next steps for Brazil
To capitalise on the momentum, the COP30 Presidency must now set out its stall early and make clear that the process to develop a roadmap will be more than just a technical exercise.
President Lula will need to put continued political weight behind a credible forward process that fosters international cooperation, unlocks implementation and support, and better coordinates existing initiatives and institutions.
The broad coalition of countries that pushed for the roadmap at COP30 must also engage early and constructively to shape the process and give it credibility.
Ingredients for success will include:
Brazil will need to launch a country-led dialogue process to inform the roadmap, led by a science-based approach, open consultation and expert input. It must outline global pathways for the transition as well as tackle the interplay between supply and demand, and the macroeconomics and geopolitics that will define the transition. President Lula’s announcement that Brazil will develop its own national roadmap also signals an important angle of international direction translated to domestic action.
The process must engage with a broad range of countries across vulnerable nations, fossil fuel-dependent developing countries, and major consumers (China, South Africa, Indonesia, UK, EU etc). Ensuring developing country concerns and needs are elevated will be essential for buy-in beyond the usual suspects, and to address challenges for those most exposed to risk.
Working closely with and securing Türkiye’s and Australia’s buy-in will also be vital to build continuity across Presidencies and embed the roadmap into the COP31 agenda.
The roadmap offers the opportunity to recognise that the only equitable transition is an orderly transition. Without a structured, collective approach, volatility exposure risks for fossil-fuel-dependent countries increases as the global transition accelerates.
The process must also address the economic and equity implications of the transition and the challenge of fiscal dependence on fossil fuels that many developing countries face head-on.
Identifying barriers to implementation and outlining strategies to unlock enabling conditions is key to ensuring all countries can benefit from the transition. This means addressing fiscal and macroeconomic risks, systemic blockers such as debt, fossil fuel subsidies and trade, technology and capacity-building, employment, and transition risks. Creating space for dialogue to share and address complex challenges, build trust, and explore learnings will be important.
Brazil can convene, but it cannot deliver alone. The roadmap process can help provide coordination of key international institutions and initiatives that are often fragmented in global energy transition governance.
This includes the IEA on energy modelling and pathways, IMF on fiscal and macroeconomic landscape, MDBs on transition finance and support, IRENA on technical assistance, and energy alliances such as BOGA, CETP, PPCA, and COFFIS for implementation pathfinding. Embedding these institutions early will help coordinate real-world delivery architecture for the energy transition.
Brazil can politically elevate the roadmap and foster engagement through a series of milestone moments across 2026, building from the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial, , to the Colombia and Netherlands conference on fossil fuel phaseout in April, through regional climate weeks (as well as London Climate Action Week), the IMF/World Bank annuals and into UNGA, the pre-COP in the Pacific and COP31.
Brazil can build a pathway beyond COP31 and into an ongoing process for collective dialogue, with outputs from the roadmap shaping both implementation in the real world and next steps for collective agreement in multilateral spaces. To grasp this space, the COP30 Presidency must drive towards a COP31 outcome on the roadmap as well as show intent beyond COP31 for the process to live on. As a starting point, it must inform the second Global Stocktake, which runs through COP32 in Ethiopia and culminates at COP33 in India, in full.
Developing the roadmap in coalitions of the willing and feeding inputs back into future rounds of UNFCCC negotiations, as well as continued work on the Action Agenda and in real-world delivery, can help bring its evidence and insights to spur new collective decisions that drive global norms.
The roadmap process presents an opening to build a pragmatic, collective effort to drive further momentum on the energy transition. Despite challenging geopolitics, countries can come together to chart a path forward – they must grasp this opportunity to ensure all nations can benefit from the security, resilience, and economic benefits of a shift to clean energy.
