Moving to renewable energy will fail unless wealthy nations help finance cleaner energy systems, industrialisation and local mineral processing across the African continent. This was the argument that African countries put to a recent meeting of 57 governments on phasing out fossil fuels.
The Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands and held in Colombia in April 2026, was the first major international gathering focused specifically on how countries might gradually reduce their dependence on coal, oil and gas. At present, there is no global agreement on how to wind down down fossil fuel production.
