Cop: Colombia demands conditions to end oil output

Colombia called on the international community to make up for the cost of President Gustavo Petro's decision to move its economy away from coal and oil towards renewable energy.

"Ambition cannot be punished," the country's representatives said at the Cop 28 UN climate change conference today in Dubai. "Instead of having incentives to move forward with this political will, our access to capital is becoming more expensive."

The country has been threatened with a credit downgrade and being "strangled with debt," a topic that it says the parties to the 2015 Paris climate agreement should address at this conference.

Petro ordered an end to new hydrocarbon exploration and production contracts soon after taking office in August 2022 despite the country's economic dependency on the sector. The change in policy led Moody's Investors Service to downgrade state-controlled oil company Ecopetrol's baseline credit assessment in August 2022. Fitch Ratings on Thursday affirmed a stable rating for the country's credit at BB+.

Colombia is Latin America's third-largest oil producer with about 735,000 b/d of output. Mining, hydrocarbons and traditional refining accounted for 12pc of the country's GDP.

But a rapid ramp-up of renewable capacity has not accompanied the decision as community opposition and regulatory hurdles have delayed development.

Oil industry groups warn that this unaligned transition will threaten energy security and the country's economy in the short-term.

Colombia's call echoes that of many developing countries. They want more funding to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change as well as secure access to the loss and damage fund, which is meant to compensate companies for the unavoidable and irreversible effects of climate change. Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has tried to unite efforts on the topic, despite disparate positions in the region. Growing Latin American oil producers such as Brazil and Guyana have proposed balancing an increase in development with environmental responsibility, in contrast to Colombia's position that supports language to phase out fossil fuels at Cop 28.

Financing pledges did soar in the opening days of the conference, removing a stumbling block that had held up talks at last year's conference. But Colombia and other developing countries have called for more.

The difficulty of the economic transition away from fossil fuels for many developing countries is the "elephant in the room," at the event, the Colombia delegation said. "It is an unprecedented change and we need the right economic conditions."

By Carla Bass