The Caribbean port city of Santa Marta sits at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Colombia’s Magdalena department. Along its shoreline runs the Drummond terminal, named after the coal multinational that operates it, where a railway juts out into the sea, loading export ships with coal hauled from vast open-pit mines in the neighboring Cesar region, near La Loma. From April 24 to 29, delegates from fifty-eight countries gathered here for the first international conference on phasing out fossil fuels, in a region where the realities of extraction are impossible to ignore.

Coorganized by Colombia and the Netherlands, the summit brought together governments, unions, indigenous peoples, frontline communities, scientists, and activists seeking to move beyond the limits of international climate negotiations and chart a just transition. The conference was divided into three chapters: an academic track, a people’s summit, and “high-level” interministerial talks — all converging at the end of the week, through designated representatives, in joint working sessions.

But what a “just transition” looks like does not carry the same meaning, nor weight, for all participants. If the Santa Marta summit laid bare the costs of fossil fuel dependence, it also exposed the divisions that remain over the scale of economic and political transformation required to break free from fossil capitalism’s stronghold.