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Brazil has published the world's first global roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels — and its most important feature is what it does not do. Released on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, by the presidency of last year's COP30 climate summit in Belem, the roadmap shows countries how they could break their dependence on coal, oil and gas while growing their economies and pulling people out of poverty. It sets no binding deadlines, names no countries, and cannot force any government to do anything. Ahead of COP31, which opens in Antalya, Turkey, this month, that combination — a real plan with no enforcement — is exactly what is being argued about.
According to reports from The Japan Times and The Guardian via Europe Says, the roadmap was the compromise that ended a bitter dispute at COP30, where the final agreement failed to explicitly mention fossil fuels after opposition from major oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. Instead of a negotiated text, the Brazilian presidency promised to produce a roadmap itself — and it has now delivered two: one on transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, and one on halting and reversing deforestation.
What the roadmap proposes
The fossil-fuel roadmap, called the TAFF Mutirao — mutirao is a Brazilian term for collective effort — lays out a collective agenda in three phases running to 2033. Countries are encouraged to draw up national transition plans by 2028, to feed into the next UN global stocktake, and then to transform their energy systems, with infrastructure upgrades and renewable investment under way by 2030 and fossil fuels replaced in the 2031-2033 phase. Among the practical steps it suggests is for oil and gas producers to urgently cut flaring and venting of gas from extraction sites.
The deforestation roadmap carries its own stark numbers: about $300 billion a year is likely to be needed for forests by 2030, rising to $500 billion a year by 2050, according to the roadmap, citing UN figures, with mechanisms such as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility proposed to help pay for it. Both documents are explicitly presented as implementation guides, not negotiation texts. COP30 president Andre Correa do Lago told The Guardian they are "documents of implementation," designed to move climate summits away from negotiating agreements and toward carrying out targets already agreed — above all the COP28 commitment in Dubai in 2023 to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
Why critics say it falls short
The criticism is specific, and it is worth stating precisely. Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, said the roadmaps are valuable but "fall short of clearly indicating the pace of change needed by including no timeline or key benchmarks." The apparent tension with the 2028-2033 phases is the heart of the dispute: the roadmap gives an order of work — plan, then build, then cut — but no country-by-country deadlines for winding down production, no interim targets for how much production or consumption should fall by which date, and no statement of who should move first. Countries are left to "diagnose" their own dependence and choose their own tools.
That vagueness is also, in Brazil's telling, the point. A binding plan would never have survived COP30; a voluntary frame might actually be used. The contrast is with the separate national roadmaps produced by nearly 60 countries that met in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April 2026 — a "coalition of the willing" whose plans, written by the governments responsible for implementing them, are more specific and prescriptive than Brazil's global document. The two tracks now run in parallel: one global and voluntary, one national and concrete.
What happens at COP31
Brazilian officials have stressed that the roadmap is a call to action, not a document to be negotiated at COP31, though it will be discussed in Antalya on November 10. A new agreement on fossil fuels is unlikely at the two-week conference. The honest test of this roadmap is therefore not what happens in Antalya, but what happens afterwards: how many governments write the national transition plans it asks for by 2028, and whether the voluntary phases harden into real policy.
For now, the roadmap's value is that it exists at all. For the first time, a COP presidency has put a global, step-by-step account of quitting fossil fuels on paper, with the argument that it is "necessary, urgent and yet possible." Whether that argument survives contact with the politics of oil-producing states is the question COP31 will begin to answer — without, itself, being asked to decide it.