Colombia, New Zealand and the UK today joined a Netherlands-led international coalition focused on phasing out incentives and subsidies for fossil fuels.
They made the announcement at the UN Cop 29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. The coalition was first formed at Cop 28 in December last year.
Member countries that sign up to the coalition commit to publish an inventory of their fossil fuel subsidies a year after joining, and to develop a plan to phase them out.
Countries agreed at Cop 26, in 2021, to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, and reaffirmed this a year later at Cop 27. G20 members first pledged in 2009 to do the same.
But global fossil fuel consumption subsidies hit over $1.2 trillion in 2022 and more than $600bn in 2023, IEA data show.
"We truly feel that this is something we should tackle at a European level as well", EU energy commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said today. "This is something the next Commission will push; this is something I will personally push", he added. New Dutch climate and green growth minister Sophie Hermans admitted that phasing out fossil fuel subsidies is a "sensitive topic", but that the country is working on a plan. The first step is to make transparent which fossil fuels subsidies are in countries' systems, she said.
The coalition now has 16 members — Austria, Antigua and Barbuda, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland, as well as the three countries that joined today.
Four members have made their national inventory of fossil fuel subsidies transparent — Belgium, France, Ireland and the Netherlands.
