SANTA MARTA (Colombia): The European Union’s climate envoy Wopke Hoekstra said on Tuesday that the energy crisis stemming from the Iran war underlined an economic and energy security imperative to phase out fossil fuels.

“We already had a very good reason to move on (from fossil fuels) for climate action... We now also have it for commercial reasons, and reasons of energy independence,” Hoekstra said at the first global talks on exiting fossil fuels.

More than 50 nations gathered in Colombia launched the first global conference on phasing out fossil fuels, warning that the worldwide energy shock ignited by the Iran war drove home risks of relying on oil, gas and coal.

Ministers and climate envoys aim to revive the transition from fossil fuels at the inaugural conference in Santa Marta against a backdrop of crippling global energy shortages and soaring fuel prices.

The world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, including US, China and India, are not attending the event

“Let’s make this a turning point in history,” Colombia’s Environment Minister Irene Velez Torres said as she opened the two-day talks.

The conference bypasses the United Nations climate talks and reflects a growing impatience with its failure to tackle fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming. But ministers said the volatility driven by the Middle East conflict also underscored the energy security imperative of shifting to renewables.

“We in Europe... are losing half a billion euros each day this war continues,” the bloc’s climate envoy Wopke Hoekstra told delegates in the coastal city. “We already had a very good reason to move on (from fossil fuels) for climate action... We now also have it for commercial reasons, and reasons of independence.”

The conference was announced late last year but organizers say the Middle East war — which has seen Gulf exports plummet — had bolstered the case for a fossil fuel phaseout.

Some governments are however weighing short-term increases to fossil fuel production to plug supply gaps, illustrating the tensions between climate ambition and energy security. On the list of attendees are major fossil fuel producers Canada, Norway and Australia, and developing oil giants Nigeria, Angola and Brazil.

They join coal-reliant emerging markets Turkiye and Vietnam, and small island nations extremely vulnerable to climate shocks, among others.

But the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases — including the United States, China and India — are not attending, nor are oil-rich Gulf states.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2026