More than 100 organizations took part in the 1st Conference for Fossil Fuel-Free Territories, held in Santa Marta, Colombia. The meeting aimed to strengthen, coordinate, and expand territorial struggles against extractivism and to build an action plan that brings together and improves strategies to prevent, halt, end, remedy, and phase out fossil fuels.

At the end of the event, held on April 24 and 25, participants signed the Declaration, reaffirming peoples’ sovereignty over their territories, the rights of nature, and the demand for an energy transition based on justice and peace.

Read the full text:

DECLARATION OF THE CONFERENCE FOR FOSSIL FUEL-FREE TERRITORIES

We live in a time that is falling apart. A time in which predatory capitalism, transformed into a capitalism of chaos, advances like a storm without a horizon, sowing uncertainty, contradictions, and fear. Geopolitical struggles for control over nature and territories are intensifying, pushing us toward multiple wars. These are not only the visible wars in Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, or the threats of intervention in Venezuela. They are also the silent wars fought every day in our territories: through the expansion of extractivism, the pollution of rivers and soils, threats by companies and states against defenders, forced displacement, violence against women, and ecocide. At its core, this is a war against life.

We live in a world where rules are dissolving and multilateralism is losing strength, where the law of the strongest replaces justice and solidarity seems like a forgotten language. In this context, the so-called corporate energy transition, together with geopolitical and imperialist interests and technological expansion, including artificial intelligence, has not reduced the voracity of the system. Instead, it has increased demand for fossil fuels and minerals, including so-called critical minerals and rare earth elements. This dynamic intensifies pressure on our countries, peoples, and territories, putting rivers, mountains, seas, and all ecosystems that sustain life at risk.

The expansion of extractivism does not occur in isolation: it is accompanied by the advance of authoritarianism, repression, militarization, and new forms of fascism that seek to discipline peoples and silence their resistance.

Faced with this situation, we do not give up. We resist, we fight, we dream, and, above all, we build. We build Fossil Fuel-Free Territories as a concrete way to halt the expansion of extractivism and open paths toward other possible worlds.

We, the participants in this Conference, brought our stories, our wounds, and our hopes. Together, we developed strategies to confront the hydrocarbon industry at every stage.

We emphasize legal advocacy, community monitoring that integrates science and ancestral knowledge, training programs in the territories, protection of the community fabric, and stronger communication to make our struggles visible. We also affirm the importance of mobilization, direct action, radical democratic practices, and the building of alliances at every level.

We recognize the value of free, prior, and informed consultation, as established in international instruments, as well as popular consultations and community protocols as legitimate and powerful tools that have enabled peoples in different territories to say no to extractivism.

At the same time, we affirm that we do not merely resist; we also propose alternatives. Ways of life already exist in our territories, based on community economies, agroecology, and energy managed by the people themselves. These are paths that place life, social justice, and harmony with nature above the accumulation of capital.

WE AFFIRM THAT:

• there can be no fossil fuel-free territories without territories of peace; and there can be no peace without truth, justice, and comprehensive reparation for peoples and nature.

• defending our territory is essential to protecting life, which means strengthening the social fabric, ensuring the protection of those who defend life, and coordinating efforts among communities, organizations, academia, and civil society.

• a just energy transition requires us to ask: energy for what, and for whom?

• we must halt the financing that sustains extractivism, demanding that companies, banks, and investors be held accountable for the impacts they cause and for remedying those impacts, including the full restoration of affected ecosystems.

• it is necessary to build a multilateralism of peoples, capable of representing the rights of nature and of all beings who inhabit it.

• we recognize the Amazon, seas, páramos, glaciers, and other territories as rights-bearing entities, proposing their consolidation as exclusion zones, free from new extractive activities.

• we must coordinate our struggles, strengthen our strategies, and turn our collective dreams into reality.

WE DEMAND respect for the self-determination of peoples, their autonomy, and their territorial sovereignty, including the right to say no and to defend their food and energy sovereignty.

And to you, governments and authorities gathered at the official Conferences, we speak with the clarity of those who defend life: do not come to manage collapse or disguise destruction with a new green rhetoric. Listen to the people, recognize the limits of the Earth, and assume your historic responsibility. There can be no transition without justice, and no future can be negotiated when life is at stake. History will not remember your promises, but your decisions. This is the moment—not another—to choose between deepening devastation or walking alongside peoples toward the radical defense of Life.

Santa Marta, April 25, 2026