Bonn, Germany – The COP31 Presidency’s electrification initiative is a positive step forward but must be coupled with a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels as part of a just transition to renewable energy to keep the 1.5°C limit within reach, Greenpeace said. 

As part of the COP31 Presidency’s Action Agenda, COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum and President of Negotiations for COP31 Chris Bowen, launched an electrification target to raise the share of final energy demand met by electricity from just over 20% currently to 35% by 2035 as part of a shift from direct fossil fuel use to clean electricity across buildings, transport and industry.

In response, Greenpeace said while electrifying households, industry and other major sectors with renewable energy is a key component of ending fossil fuel use, a focus alone on growing renewables and expanding electrification will not be enough without a managed, proactive wind-down of fossil fuel production as well.

Berkan Ozyer, Director of Greenpeace Türkiye, said: “Türkiye’s call to accelerate global electrification ahead of COP31 is a vital and highly welcome step toward a clean energy future. However, it is a deep contradiction that Türkiye, as COP31 host, is championing a vision of electrification in the global arena while continuing to keep 37 active coal power plants running and leaving the door open for new projects at home.

“While dependence on fossil fuels condemns us to expensive energy and a reliance on global supply chains, our massive wind and solar potential is the true key to Turkish independence. Real climate leadership means winning the electrification race, not just by talking about clean energy, but by setting a bold and just coal phase-out date as part of a transition away from all fossil fuels.” 

The past decade has seen strong progress in the roll-out of renewable energy and in 2026 unprecedented momentum is being built towards the phase out of fossil fuels, after 57 committed countries came together in Santa Marta in April and the global energy shock brought on by the war on Iran exposed the inherent risk of fossil fuel reliance.

Coinciding with the Bonn Climate Change Conference, Greenpeace International has released a report outlining the rapid growth in renewables since the Paris Agreement and  calling for an accelerated fair, fast and funded just transition through deliberate political choices and strong policy frameworks.[1][2] 

Dr Simon Bradshaw, Senior Climate Advisor, Greenpeace Australia Pacific said: “Ministers Bowen and Kurum must maintain the global momentum towards a phase-out of fossil fuels and ensure that a just transition is at the heart of the COP31 agenda.

“As Minister Bowen said, we are in the middle of a global fossil fuel crisis. Ending the fossil fuel chokehold is the only path towards greater peace and security and the only way to keep 1.5°C within reach. This means no new fossil fuel approvals and a managed phase out of fossil fuel production. 

“Renewable electrification is the path to universal energy access, better health and reducing inequality, but only if the solutions are accessible to all. 

“Nowhere are the benefits of renewable electrification clearer than in the Pacific. For some countries, fuel import costs are equivalent to 25% of GDP. The region has been hit particularly hard by the current global fossil fuel crisis, with multiple Pacific countries declaring a state of emergency over concerns for fuel and power supply.

“The Pacific is already facing the brunt of a climate crisis and now faces the compounding injustice of an energy crisis brought on by fossil fuel dependence. It did not create either of these crises, but is among the most exposed to both. The Pacific is leading the global push beyond fossil fuels, with the aim of becoming the world’s first fossil fuel free region.” 

ENDS

Notes:

[1] Read the Greenpeace Energy [R]evolution+10 report

[2] A Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels: Policy Briefing

Contact:
Beyza Kural, Senior Communication Expert, Greenpeace Türkiye, +90 5336 417 123, beyza.kural@greenpeace.org

Kate O’Callaghan, Communications Manager, Greenpeace Australia Pacific, +61 4062 31892 kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace International Press Desk, +31 (0)20 718 2470 (available 24 hours), pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org

The death toll and destruction of civilian infrastructure from the US-Israel war on Iran has been devastating and, additionally, the conflict has sparked political turmoil, a global energy supply shock and soaring cost-of-living pressures that are leading to looming economic headwinds.

Inadvertently, now 100 days after the start of the conflict, we can see that it is also supercharging the world’s shift to renewable energy in a global disruption that is now presenting a seismic opportunity to free ourselves of fossil fuel dependency.

But this systemic shift to clean, secure and reliable renewable energy must be planned with a long-term perspective as part of a fair, fast and funded just transition as governments work to meet their Paris Agreement obligations to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Where we were 10 years ago

The 2015 Paris Agreement was a landmark moment and on its 10th anniversary in 2025, the Agreement was lauded for helping to accelerate the clean energy transition, lower projected global greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the projected temperature increase.

Despite this, our climate has continued to warm and the years 2015-2025 have been the hottest 11 years on record, placing the 1.5°C threshold under threat. That’s the bad news. 

The good news, however, is the rapid pace of change in the renewables sector. Back in 2015, Greenpeace’s visionary Energy [R]evolution scenario was a transformative, nuclear-free blueprint for a 100 % renewable future. It was far more ambitious than the International Energy Agency’s projections and today, we can see that the E[R] scenarios were not far off the mark. 

In fact, in the past 10 years, the energy landscape has changed tremendously and the most visible success of the last decade lies in the sheer velocity of the renewable rollout. For the first time, wind and solar are growing faster than global electricity consumption, actively eating the market share of fossil fuels, mainly due to the significant cost reduction of renewables.

Now, amid the current energy supply crisis, the scale of change witnessed in the past 10 years offers great hope for a renewable future.

Electrification, expanding solar and wind power and lower costs 

Between 2015 and 2025, global solar power capacity increased from 226 Gigawatt (GW) in 2015 to 2,392 GW in 2025. Electricity generation through solar power actually exceeded the ambitious projections made in the E[R] scenario and by far exceeded the modest projections made by the IEA’s World Energy Outlook (WEO).

In the same timeframe, wind power capacity increased from 416 GW in 2015 to 1,291 GW in 2025. Actual wind power generation in 2025 proved to be slightly below the E[R] projections, but was substantially higher than the WEO scenario. Further developments with regard to offshore wind in particular offer hope that in the coming years reality will surpass the E[R] projection.

The reason for such successful renewable electricity growth is the significant cost reduction. The E[R] scenario underestimated the cost reduction potential between 2015 and 2025 for solar and wind. Solar reduced costs per kilowatt by around 70 % while the E[R] projected 42%. Both onshore wind and offshore wind were able to halve costs while the E[R] projected 6% and 27% respectively.  

Political change, the energy transformation and a global supply shock

In the past decade, the failure of governments to reduce global total energy demand has meant, however, that the growth in solar and wind only covered increased energy demand rather than replacing fossil fuel use. 

Now, the war on Iran has sharpened both the urgency and inevitability of a transition to renewables, exposing how an engineered dependence on fossil fuels is a massive geopolitical liability that demands systemic and broad sectoral changes.

After the UN climate talks COP30 spectacularly failed to agree last year on the need to develop a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels despite wide support, 57 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April 2026 to explicitly discuss how to transition away from fossil fuels.

What we can say is that the geopolitical faultlines are becoming very clear: on one side there are countries like the US that are rusted on to a ‘drill, baby, drill’ approach and on the other, there are countries ready to plan for and implement a post-fossil-fuel future.

But what governments must do now is ensure the policy frameworks are in place to enable a fair, fast and funded transition, because beyond economics, the shift is about resilience.

Decentralised, democratically owned renewable energy systems controlled and owned by the people are harder to sabotage and immune to shipping disruptions, ensuring that even in times of crisis, our homes, schools, and hospitals remain powered and continue to deliver social, economic and environmental benefits for all.

What comes next

What the ambitious vision of the Energy [R]evolution and the staggering acceleration of renewables in the past 10 years show is that the future of our energy transition is bright.

Critically, however, the nations currently leading this transformation and securing the rewards of a clean energy future demonstrate that rapid change is a deliberate result of active political choices and strong policy frameworks.

Read our reports:

The Energy [R]evolution+10

A Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels

From wartime Ukraine to the Iran energy shock, decentralised renewables are emerging as a real security solution. Community solar and local grids can protect households from price spikes and war‑fuelled crises, showing governments exactly how to protect their citizens.

How renewables became a security imperative in Ukraine

In an era defined by geopolitical instability and soaring household bills, a quiet revolution is taking place where the stakes are highest. Amid continuous infrastructure attacks by Russia, communities across Ukraine are constructing a blueprint for global energy security. Forward-thinking municipalities are actively transforming their energy architecture, moving away from a fragile dependence on fossil fuels to build independent, decentralised clean energy networks. 

Most movingly, this transformation is being championed by the people of Slavutych – the purpose-built city constructed to rehome the displaced workers and families who left Chornobyl after the 1986 nuclear disaster. Decades after fleeing a devastating nuclear catastrophe, this community has pioneered Ukraine’s first municipal solar cooperative, installing crowd-funded solar arrays on public rooftops to reclaim power over their town’s economic future.

Similar distributed networks are taking root across the country: from the solar-and-heat-pump rebuilding of the Horenka primary care clinic to the resilient power sharing of the Kyiv Green Apartment Building Association and the Trostyanets multi-apartment building reconstruction. Despite dealing with active wartime threats, the municipality of Chortkiv became the first city to sign the Gas-Free Cities Declaration, committing itself to a total fossil gas phase-out. With this historic move, the community is actively breaking its dependence on the volatile fossil fuel system, choosing instead a path towards community resilience, safety, and long-term economic prosperity. 

If a city navigating an active war can completely commit to a future free of fossil gas, every city on Earth can. These pioneer projects in Ukraine reveal a profound truth for the rest of the world: decentralised renewable energy is not just a climate solution, it is a foundational global security imperative.

Fossil fuel energy systems engineered for crisis

Forward‑thinking Ukrainian municipalities are actively building resilience, yet much commentary elsewhere still treats modern energy crises as isolated, freak incidents. In truth, the problem is structural.

While decentralised communities insulate themselves from instability, our hyper-centralised global reliance on oil and gas exposes everyday citizens and governments to constant, unmanageable risks.

We see this unfolding right now in the compounding economic shocks following the war involving Iran. Gas prices rose for ordinary households across European capitals, while energy importing nations across Africa and Asia are bearing the brunt of the Middle East conflict’s energy shocks.

The sudden surge in global fuel prices has completely priced local economies out of the market, forcing governments to ration energy, mandate rotating power cuts, and, in some parts of Asia, even restrict household cooking gas.

As we see, volatility usually hits domestic budgets directly, anchoring the macro-crisis in painful daily trade-offs for families forced to navigate soaring utility bills alongside rising food costs. Such a disruption is not a failure of the fossil fuel system; it is the predictable, inevitable outcome of how it is designed to work.

The predictable volatility trap of fossil fuels

For decades, the public has been sold a corporate narrative: fossil gas is a reliable “bridge fuel” necessary to stabilise energy networks. Yet, history tells a starkly different story of cyclical crises. Whenever geopolitical hostility erupts – from the 1970s OPEC oil embargoes, to the global price spikes triggered by Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to modern supply crunches around the Strait of Hormuz – global commodity prices shoot up with algorithmic predictability. These are not separate events; they are the recurring symptoms of a broken energy system engineered around two core vulnerabilities:

Physical infrastructure is fragile. Fossil fuel systems rely on rigid, highly concentrated bottlenecks – vulnerable shipping choke points, international pipelines and massive processing plants – that double as high-value military targets. The moment geopolitical hostility ignites, global financial markets immediately panic over potential supply cuts. Speculative trading floors violently spike global commodity prices before a single drop of fuel is even lost. We see this vulnerability starkly in Ukraine, where strikes systematically targeted centralised thermal power plants and the energy grid, plunging millions into darkness, leaving entire communities to freeze in their homes. This demonstrates well how easily a centralised energy architecture can be weaponised to trigger global financial panic.  

Corporate war profiteering. The physical fragility of the grid is directly converted into massive private wealth because the system is engineered to capitalise on crises. A textbook example of this occurred during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: as Europe rightfully phased out Russian pipeline gas, LNG suppliers aggressively exploited the supply shock, outbidding vulnerable regions and locking countries into expensive, decades-long contracts. These corporations never absorb geopolitical shocks; instead, they immediately pass the inflated costs down to consumers. Consequently, while ordinary families are forced into devastating energy poverty, fossil fuel corporations consistently register record-breaking windfall profits during wartime.

The moment peace is on the horizon, this entire profit machine stalls: when a ceasefire was announced to pause hostilities, oil giants saw their shares immediately tumble with BP dropping 6% and Shell losing 4.7%. The market’s reaction exposes a profound truth: the fossil fuel business model treats international chaos as a corporate asset, turning global instability and human suffering into investor payouts. 

The solution that breaks the loop is distributed clean energy that permanently dismantles this entire apparatus. By shifting power generation away from vulnerable bottlenecks to millions of local, interconnected points – rooftop solar, community wind co‑operatives and regional battery storage – we physically remove the targets.

When a disaster occurs, these localised power networks keep critical hospital operating rooms, clean water pumps, and local schools fully operational. Local sunlight and wind cannot be manipulated by speculators, or turned off by a hostile foreign power.

The independence illusion of the gas industry driving real‑world insecurity

To protect corporate interests, the energy lobby continues to claim that expanding domestic oil and gas extraction – or swapping one foreign supplier for another – will deliver national energy independence and cheap energy bills. This claim is false in most countries where fossil fuel prices are tied to volatile global commodity market prices.

Data compiled by global energy authorities confirms that the regions navigating modern economic shocks with the greatest resilience are precisely those that have scaled local renewable energy capacity and prioritised aggressive energy efficiency.

Expanding gas infrastructure creates permanent economic and environmental traps. Beyond binding communities to decades of unjust debt, burning these fuels accelerates the extreme weather events tearing through people’s everyday safety net and global stability. Scientists can now calculate how corporate pollution has supercharged deadly heatwaves, devastating floods, and prolonged agricultural droughts – making these catastrophes structurally impossible without human-induced warming.

This is no longer just a scientific debate – it is an international legal reality. Reinforcing this accountability, a historic landmark ruling by the United Nations General Assembly has declared that tackling the climate crisis is a strict legal duty under international law, not a voluntary political choice. Governments that keep expanding and burning fossil fuels are now legally vulnerable for the thousands of early deaths caused by supercharged heatwaves, the complete destruction of homes and livelihoods swallowed by catastrophic floods, and the systemic agricultural breakdowns causing global food shortages. While these climate disasters impact almost everyone, they crush the most marginalised and financially sensitive populations first and hardest.

Renewables as public safety

To prevent future systemic shocks, governments must make sure they reach their net-zero targets by immediately pivoting public resources into tangible energy upgrades. Transitioning to decentralised renewables is no longer just an environmental goal – it is a core pillar of public safety and household self-defense.

Towns in war-torn Ukraine have already given the world a solid template: from crowd-funded municipal solar in Slavutych to solar-powered clinics in Horenka and Trostyanets, community-led clean energy is actively defending human life under the harshest conditions. Scaling these resilient models globally is the ultimate investment to shield communities from corporate exploitation, enhance economic prosperity, and ensure true security.

Accelerate decentralised renewables and efficiency: Replicate Ukraine’s pioneering community models globally by prioritizing public investments into decentralised municipal solar grids, regional battery storage reserves, deep building insulation upgrades, and residential heat pump installations. This lowers baseload demand and permanently shields regional economies from global market speculation. 

Halt all fossil infrastructure expansion: Enact immediate moratoriums on new gas drilling exploration, pipeline infrastructure, and LNG terminals. Switching one pipeline or LNG supplier for another does not reduce dependency.

Enforce systemic accountability: Tax fossil fuel profits — clawing back the wealth generated from wartime profiteering and climate-induced tragedies to directly finance the public deployment of clean energy systems for low-and middle-income households worldwide. 

The ultimate lesson from Ukraine’s resilient municipalities and the economic ripples of the global energy crisis is clear: true security cannot be built on a volatile, centralised foundation. We must revoke the social and political licence of the fossil fuel industry, reclaiming their profits to build a community-owned, genuinely resilient energy landscape that serves people over profit. 

Take action now

The fossil fuel system is built to maximise corporate profits while passing the risk to everyday people. Join us in demanding that governments hold energy profiteers financially accountable and mandate an immediate, fair transition to local clean energy.

Sign the petition to demand permanent taxes on fossil fuel profits and fund a secure, renewable energy future for all.

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Reka Hunyadi is the Communications Lead of Greenpeace’s Global Gas campaign with Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe.