Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Colombia hosts a climate summit, acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez takes an international trip, and researchers estimate the cost of U.S. boat strikes.
Envoys from dozens of countries, including major oil producers such as Canada and Norway, attended a first-of-its-kind climate summit in Santa Marta, Colombia, this week. The event focused on a topic that environmentalists have long struggled to advance in United Nations climate negotiations: the economic transition away from fossil fuels.
U.N. climate talks have long haggled over greenhouse gas emissions levels rather than targeting fossil fuel use itself. But at its conference in Brazil in November, known as COP30, more than 80 governments backed the idea of national plans to move away from fossil fuels.
The motion was quashed in the full plenary of around 190 countries, where decisions require unanimity. Key detractors included Russia and Saudi Arabia. That failure triggered this week’s summit in Santa Marta, which took place outside the U.N. framework. Colombia co-hosted the event with the Netherlands.
