Breaking Climate Behemoth: Video & Highlights

  • Jun 11, 2026
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From Gaza to Venezuela to the Strait of Hormuz, fossil fuel flows are shaping the terrain of war, geopolitics, and the global energy crisis.

Against this backdrop, ministers from 59 countries gathered alongside activists, Indigenous leaders, scientists, and other experts in Santa Marta, Colombia in late April for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Alongside them were activists, Indigenous leaders, scientists, and organisers from around the world for what many described as a potentially historic moment in global climate diplomacy.

Three of our Red Natural History Fellows were on the ground–and they joined us on Zoom to report back. Our roundtable “Breaking Climate Behemoth” covered what happened behind closed doors and in the streets, unpacking not only the problems and controversies that flared up in Santa Marta, but also the openings, models for engagement, and new grounds for solidarity that were brought into view.

Watch the full recording, read highlights, and explore resources from the Fellows below.

Speakers:  

  • Janene Yazzie (Diné), Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and human rights advocate, longtime community organizer from the Navajo Nation, and Director of Global Programmes for The Woven Project
  • Mohammed Usrof, Palestinian researcher, organiser, and Founder and Executive Director of the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy
  • Joel Wainwright, Professor at Ohio State University and author of The End: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis (2025)

Moderators:

  • Beka Economopoulos, Executive Director, The Natural History Museum
  • Steve Lyons, Research Director, The Natural History Museum 

This was the second event in our ongoing programming series, Natural History From the Other Side, curated by the 2026–2028 cohort of Red Natural History Fellows. Made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation and 4Culture. 

Roundtable Highlights

Did the Santa Marta convening live up to the hype?

In this wide-ranging conversation, Joel Wainwright, Janene Yazzie, and Mohammed Usrof unpacked the conference from multiple angles, grappling with a set of urgent questions raised by this emerging “coalition of the willing” — a bloc of countries, from Colombia to France, with sharply different visions of what “transitioning away from fossil fuels” might actually mean in practice. 

Who shaped the agenda before the gathering began—and who was excluded from it? What would a genuinely supply-side, accountability-first climate strategy require beyond declarations and diplomacy? What did it mean for conference organizers to remove the word “just” from the “transition” they aim to advance? And what did the conference’s treatment of Palestine, genocide, Indigenous Peoples, and war-driven fossil fuel flows reveal about the limits of this new coalition? 

Wainwright situated the conference within its geopolitical context, tracing how the Santa Marta gathering came to be and what its origin reveals about the limits of the stalled UN climate process. He emphasized the significance of the conference’s shift in framing, where the question of how to stop extracting fossil fuels from the Earth’s crust—notably absent from the agenda at COP30 in Brazil—was not a topic to be debated, but the starting point for discussion.

Yazzie, attending as a representative of the Woven Project—an organization that fosters connection, collaboration, and global knowledge exchange by and for Indigenous Peoples—focused her remarks on how Indigenous communities and territories were engaged within the convening itself.

She highlighted the efforts of OPIAC, a regional organization representing Colombian Amazon communities, which fought to secure space for Indigenous participation and played a key role in establishing the Indigenous Autonomous Space. But she also underscored how, despite these important efforts, Indigenous Peoples and concerns were barely acknowledged in the conference’s official outcome document—reproducing a familiar pattern of marginalization that Indigenous Peoples have long confronted within the UN climate process. And yet, despite her justified critique of the conference, Yazzie insisted on the merit of engaging in global climate forums and processes, rather than abandoning them altogether.

All three of our panelists emphasized how Santa Marta was far more than a diplomatic affair. For his part, Usroff, representing the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy, described how organizers used the conference as an opportunity to advance campaigns aimed at disrupting the fossil fuel supply chains materially sustaining genocide in Gaza. 

Insisting on the importance of building solidarity between and among unions at key chokepoints in fossil fuel supply chains to enforce an embargo on exports to Israel, Usrof told the inspiring story of solidarity between Colombian mining trade unions and dockworkers forced a historic embargo, effectively blocking a path through which coal moves from the Amazon to the Israeli state apparatus. In this remarkable display of solidarity, we’re reminded that working class solidarity is a key resource in the fight for justice—the root of any “just transition” worthy of the name.

The conversation ended with the question of political strategy, considering the key strategic interventions the international climate justice movement ought to be making in the aftermath of Santa Marta.

Yazzie concluded her remarks with an incisive call for analysis and action: 

“We have the responsibility to make the linkages between what’s happening here in the Global North and what’s happening in the Global South, to make connections between the structures of power that were birthed here in the Global North—structures of power that continue to grow, monopolize wealth, and monopolize the means of violence here, at the same time as they are spreading out to other places.

We need to put an end to this system–and we can only do that by building meaningful solidarity across sectors. I think in the US, that means bringing together workers, Black Lives Matter movements, Black power movements, Indigenous power movements, Land Back movements, and environmental justice movements in ways that effectively resist Empire from the belly of the beast.”

Resources & Learn More

The Conference & Its Process

Indigenous Peoples’ Position & Reflections

Critical Responses & Sign-On Statements

Articles & Analysis

Reports & Briefings from the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy (PICS)

Books

Organizations