Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Cecilia Requena is a Bolivian senator with the Parliament Without a Fossil Future and Juan Pablo Osornio is director of engagement and policy at Earth Insight.
At the end of April, dozens of government delegations will meet in Colombia The first conference on moving away from fossil fuels. Along with road maps He announced at the UN climate summit in November In Brazil, which will call on countries to transition away from fossil fuels and stop deforestation by 2030, the political will is building to save our most critical natural resources.
Now we need a practical application of where and how this will work: the exact places where the line is drawn against new fossil fuel extraction. That’s what Fossil Free Zones offer.
What is a Fossil Free Zone?
A Fossil Free Zone is an area demarcated based on its ecological, biodiversity or cultural importance, where the exploration, extraction and development of fossil fuels are always prohibited. Think tropical rainforests, key biodiversity hotspots, indigenous peoples’ territories and critical marine ecosystems. They turn the abstract global commitment to move away from fossil fuels into something tangible: a map, a border, a legal protection.
The stakes for getting it right are huge. Studies show that oil and gas are blocked already about 179 million hectares overlap with tropical moist forests, approximately 21% of the forest cover of the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia.
Worldwide, almost 27% of the world’s conventional oil resources overlap with the socio-environmental area of highest priority. only in 2024, 85% of new oil discoveries were made offshoreoften overlapping with marine biodiversity hotspots.
Colombia: a model for the world
No country better illustrates the possibilities than Colombia; respectively, the nation organizing this conference (together with the Netherlands). Last September, Colombia announced a landmark ban of fossil fuel and mining extraction throughout the Amazon region, the world’s first region-wide Fossil Free Zone.
Colombia’s decision to develop unexploited reserves beneath the country’s forest is a result of our new research. creating billions of dollars in lost assets while doing almost nothing for national energy security. However, it would threaten 20% of the entire Amazonian forest and the territories of almost 70% of indigenous and local communities whose lands overlap with fossil fuel concessions. In most of the Colombian Amazon, the cost of extraction is higher than the cost of conservation.
How a global roadmap can deliver on its promise to stop deforestation
Other countries are also taking steps in this direction. Mexico has it 100 million hectares of similar protected areas, Guatemala ended oil extraction in the Maya Biosphere Reserveand Parliamentarians of the Amazon basin Legislation has been presented to extend the ban to the entire region.
The economic case for leaving fossil fuels in the ground
The end of fossil fuels – a time when global demand for renewable energy is declining at scale – means that unconventional and frontier reserves in remote forests are increasingly competitive. They require significant public investment in infrastructure, including roads that themselves become vectors for illegal logging, small-scale mining and agricultural exploitation. The risk of damaged assets is real and growing.
In 2025, the growth of wind and solar exceeded all new electricity requestsand More than a quarter of all vehicles sold were electric.
For forest nations, an economic logic for protection is also emerging: intact forests generate jobs and income from protected area management, water services and sustainable tourism, and support the small-scale agriculture on which most rural economies depend. They also protect water security for agriculture and energy generation and act as carbon sinks. More than 33 million people are directly employed in the forestry sectorand there are more than 1.6 billion small producer forest farms.
Fossil fuel investing amid volatile energy markets
Developing countries with fossil fuel reserves face real pressures to develop them: credit ratings, currency stability, social services and energy security are tied to an ever-increasing fossil fuel limit, especially amid volatile energy markets.
The conflict in Iran has exacerbated volatility, rising oil prices and renewed short-term pressure on fossil fuel-dependent governments to expand domestic production, making the case for internationally protected Fossil Free Zones, along with real financial support, even more urgent.
innovative financial mechanisms such as Tropical Forest Forever Installation – A fund proposed at COP30 would provide long-term, results-based payments to tropical forest nations to keep forests standing – could change the economic scale enough to make Fossil Sites in high-integrity forests politically viable.
Colombia has pledged to exit the investment protection system after the fossil fuel disputes
Industries leading the energy transition (renewable energy developers, green hydrogen producers, sustainable financial institutions and technology companies with clean supply chain commitments) also have a direct stake in the Fossil Free Zone agenda. In addition, the reputational and legal risks of investments in fossil fuel frontiers are increasing.
Already, 11 banks have applied varying degrees of financial restrictions to the Amazonian oil and gas sector. Some of these policies are strong, others are closer to greenwashing, but these commitments prove that banks see increasing risks.
What to take away from the Colombia conference
The hope for the next conference in Colombia is to at least raise Fossil Free Zones as part of a shared international vision for the energy transition. Ideally, a coalition of countries commits to include Fossil Free Zones in their national plans and establishes a shared framework with principles for identifying new zones and implementation guidelines for other countries.
WATCH OUR WEBINAR: Santa Marta – Fossil Fuel Transition in an Unstable World
This is a practical march for countries that want to join the global transition but need a concrete geographically defined starting point, and as a direct delivery mechanism for the deforestation roadmap, turning the global commitment to halt forest loss into concrete action to thwart a real driver of deforestation.
The question is no longer whether fossil fuel extraction will end, but whether that end will be managed or chaotic, endangering the planet’s most critical ecosystems. Fossil Free Zones offer the hope of avoiding irreversible damage to the forests, marine ecosystems and indigenous communities that represent humanity’s best insurance against collapse, one territory at a time.
