A new scientific panel dedicated to the energy transition aims to put fossil fuel phaseout roadmaps at the heart of climate policy. Announced in April at the inaugural Transition Away conference in Santa Marta, Colombia, the panel will produce regular technical reports to guide governments in accelerating the shift to clean sources of energy.
A group of leading energy scientists from around the world is beginning to define the panel’s structure and organisation. But many unanswered questions remain: how will it deliver useful information in the required timeframe? How will it balance the competing needs of nations? And will it really be able to play a significant role in addressing the climate crisis?
Who will be on the science panel and how is it structured?
The idea for an independent science panel first came from André Corrêa do Lago, who in 2025 presided over the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s most recent major summit, COP30 in Brazil.
Do Lago asked the environmental scientists Carlos Nobre, from Brazil, and Johan Rockström, from Sweden, to envision what it could look like. They then presented their suggestions in Santa Marta, introducing the three co-chairs and four working groups. This became the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition (SPGET).
The panel is chaired by Ottmar Edenhofer, who directs the Potsdam Institute in Germany, Gilberto Jannuzzi, a researcher at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil, and Vera Songwe, a development finance expert from Cameroon.
About 80 scientists will form working groups across four key areas: transition pathways, technological solutions, policies and finance.
Jannuzzi and Songwe told Dialogue Earth that some of these scientists have already been invited. One aim has been to cultivate balance in terms of both gender and geography.
“We want to gather researchers from the Global South and the Global North and produce applicable knowledge to help decision-makers put their energy transition roadmaps into practice,” Jannuzzi said. “Some countries need technical guidance on how to accelerate their energy transition, and we can help them with our shared knowledge.”
They are actively seeking funding from donors for the panel, which will have its secretariat in São Paulo.
What will the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition do?
At COP30, more than 80 countries called for a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. Two years earlier, COP28 had climaxed with an agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels” but no detail on how. While the development of a roadmap did not make it into the final text of COP30, the Brazilian presidency agreed to continue working on this beyond the conference. A global roadmap is now expected to be unveiled in November, at COP31.
Simultaneously, the 57 nations represented at the Transition Away conference have agreed to develop national phaseout roadmaps. So far, France is the only country to have published one. Colombia’s is being drafted.
The SPGET will provide scientific analysis to support both efforts. The first report, likely a global policy brief, will be presented at COP31 in November in Türkiye.
Unofficially, this work had already begun. About 400 academics participated in Santa Marta at a science pre-conference, where they presented a report with global recommendations for the energy transition. These include: banning new fossil fuel infrastructure and retraining associated workers, phasing out fossil fuel subsidies and banning advertising related to the industry, and reducing financing costs for renewable sources of energy.
“There is consensus on the general features that a just energy transition should have,” Paola Yanguas Parra, policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), told Dialogue Earth. “Academia can give an important direction to the political process of the roadmaps, first with Santa Marta and now with the science panel.”
Antonio Hill, a just energy transition adviser for the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), agreed: “The panel can be a good complement to the international architecture that has emerged to support the roadmaps since COP30. But it won’t change the scenario by itself; a lot more needs to happen, particularly on government actions.”
How will the SPGET interact with governments and other panels?
The world’s leading climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requires countries to approve each of its reports. This has led to a politically disputed process, with some countries trying to weaken the recommendations. To avoid this, the SPGET will not go through a governmental approval process.
The panel will still engage with governments, Jannuzzi and Songwe said, and focus areas will even be guided by them. “Our reports will be demand-driven,” Songwe told Dialogue Earth. “This might be from local, regional or national governments but also from requests coming in from the private sector and civil society.”
Hill said the panel should tread carefully in how it engages with governments: “There needs to be a space where governments can explore without being pressured to commit. Avoiding a prescriptive approach makes sense. The ideal relationship would be for governments to develop enough trust to link the panel’s contributions to their policies.”
If it’s done well, there could be strong results. If not, it could end up undermining the science rather than strengthening itPaola Yanguas Parra, policy advisor, International Institute for Sustainable Development
Songwe said the panel will not duplicate or replicate work already done by the IPCC or other bodies such as the International Energy Agency (IEA): “We are here to find what the optimal transition pathways are and provide guidance to stakeholders. And also to highlight the importance of why the transition has to be made, showing the cost of inaction.”
The overall objective will be to help countries create and apply their roadmaps, giving them tools to boost electrification, ensure the transition is done in a just and equitable way, and to make the roadmaps feasible and applicable, Jannuzzi said.
The members of the four working groups will meet regularly, likely every month, to produce their reports. When doing so, they will be advised by non-governmental stakeholders, such as the private sector and Indigenous representatives. This will be complemented by a board of trustees, who will have oversight of the whole process, as well as external reviewers.
What are the challenges?
The panel wants to be “much faster” than the IPCC, Jannuzzi said. It can take between five and seven years for the IPCC’s assessment reports to be completed: “Our process has to be sound, credible and quick. We are very aware of the timing.” This will not affect the quality of the reports, Jannuzzi and Songwe said.
But Yanguas Parra, while supportive of the initiative, noted that producing rigorous scientific work takes time: “If it’s done well, there could be strong results. If not, it could end up undermining the science rather than strengthening it.”
Funding is another open question. Jannuzzi acknowledged the panel is still in its early stages, and that “nothing happens if we don’t have enough funding.” Songwe confirmed that a funding gap needs to be closed. The panel is seeking contributions from governments, as well as from philanthropic foundations and other donors.
Yanguas Parra warned that scientists from the Global South could end up contributing to panel work without being paid – on top of heavy teaching loads – compared with counterparts at well-resourced northern universities. This could potentially skew both the panel’s independence and the balance of its geographical spread.
Then there is the question of whether governments will listen. Hill welcomed the panel as a useful addition to the international architecture that has emerged around transition roadmaps since COP30. But he was also cautious about its limits.
Jannuzzi acknowledged that, at COP30, the energy transition was effectively sidelined because “many countries are not interested in phasing out quickly.” The panel will be operating in that political environment: producing transition reports for governments that remain seemingly ambivalent.
“Our ambition has to accommodate the timing and the resources we have – but without compromising the quality of the output,” Jannuzzi said.
The first test will come at COP31 in Türkiye this November, when the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition files its inaugural report.
