How the ‘Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics’ is lighting a fire under big oil

Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad once worked for Shell. Now, as the country gears up to host the biodiversity Cop16, she is calling for a just transition away from fossil fuels

She is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuel on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career was sparked in the halls of an oil company. It began when she resigned as a sustainability consultant with Shell in 2009 and returned home to Colombia. She was 32 and disillusioned, a far cry from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the most high-profile progressive leaders in global environmental politics.

Muhamad joined Shell an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought that you could make a huge impact within an energy company on the climate issue, especially because all their publicity was saying that they were going to become an energy company, meaning they will not be only a fossil fuel company,” she says, when we meet in the Colombian embassy in London.

“I resigned the date that they decided to put their innovation money on fracking.”

Now 47, Muhamad, whose surname comes from her Palestinian grandfather, is preparing to oversee biodiversity Cop16, a summit on the future of life on Earth that will bring together leaders from nearly 200 countries in Cali, Colombia, next month. For many, she is a rising star of the environmental movement, joining voices such as the Barbadian prime minister, Mia Mottley, in putting forward an alternative vision of how the world could be, and demanding the developed world finance a just transition.

“Susana is the Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics,” says activist Oscar Soria. “Like Kahlo, whose art challenged cultural norms and spoke of resilience, Muhamad paints a vision of ecological justice that goes beyond traditional environmentalism … an environmental agenda that is … reshaping the narrative around climate justice and biodiversity restitution.”

Colombia’s embassy is sandwiched between Harrods and its Ecuadorian counterpart, and the room we meet in has a front row seat to the UK capital’s wealthiest extremes. Outside, a Rolls-Royce SUV and a blacked-out BMW wait with their drivers next to the high-end department store. Convertible supercars pass shoppers swinging luxury purchases from their hands. Muhamad, representing Colombia’s first ever leftist government, is entertaining NGOs, journalists and senior British politicians – and pushing a vision of “just transition” that would resolve economic imbalances alongside the environmental.

The minister has had to be careful to avoid rhetoric on global inequality that might allow her political opponents to tie her administration to more radical leftwing politicians from her region, but she is not naive to the potential pitfalls on the path to net zero. “We have to be clear that this energy transition cannot be at the cost of Indigenous peoples, local communities and biodiversity,” she told the plenary hall at the conclusion of Cop28 in Dubai last December after a deal to transition away from fossil fuels was passed. “In this balance between opportunity and risk lies responsibility. I want to call on everyone to keep being mobilised because intergenerational justice with this text is still at stake,” she said.

Colombia became the first significant fossil fuel producer to join an alliance of nations calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty at the December meeting. President Gustavo Petro’s administration is pushing to ban fracking as it tries to phase out coal, oil and gas, pledging to make biodiversity the basis of its wealth in the post-fossil fuels era. Last month, she launched a $40bn investment plan aimed at making this vision a reality. Muhamad was one of the ministers leading efforts to include “phase out” in the final Cop28 text in Dubai – an attempt that was ultimately unsuccessful. Colombia and Brazil, under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have been leading efforts to end deforestation in the Amazon.

The night before the embassy meeting, Muhamad addressed an event for the nature summit at the Natural History Museum. Standing under a blue whale skeleton and with a statue of Charles Darwin at her back, Muhamad underscored the urgency of the task, inviting the world to the “people’s Cop”. “As we decarbonise, we have to protect and recover nature because otherwise the climate will not stabilise,” she told the crowd.

Muhamad has been quick to point out that decarbonisation efforts alone will be futile without the conservation of the natural world and the huge carbon sink it provides, which absorbs half of all human emissions each year. “There is a double movement humanity must make. The first one is to decarbonise and have a just energy transition,” she said in August while announcing her vision for the conference. “The other side of the coin is to restore nature and allow nature to take again its power over planet Earth so that we can really stabilise the climate.”

The scientific backdrop to October’s conference is bleak. Figures from WWF show that wildlife populations have plunged due to a mixture of habitat loss, pollution, overconsumption, the spread of invasive species and global heating. Last year was the hottest ever recorded. The droughts and extreme heat have brought catastrophic consequences for Earth’s forests, grasslands and oceans: ecosystems that underpin human health, food security and civilisation. Despite the warnings, the UN’s biodiversity convention has long been overshadowed by its climate counterpart, and governments have never met a single target they have set for themselves on biodiversity.

The summit also has important domestic significance. Since Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla, announced at the climate change Cop28 in Dubai last year that Colombia would host the biodiversity conference, he and Muhamad have put Cop16 at the heart of the domestic agenda, hoping to use it as a chance to bring lasting peace with hold-out rebel groups in forest areas. In July, Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, threatened the summit after a series of bombings and shootings that were blamed on the group, but it has since backed down on the threat. Even so, 12,000 soldiers and police offers will be in Cali to guard the conference.

“It was a very strange situation, and we are also hoping to use Cop as a way to promote peace within the country,” Muhamad says.

At home, her ministerial brief ranges from eliminating deforestation across the country, which has fallen to its lowest level in 23 years, to managing Pablo Escobar’s hippos, which have thrived east of Medellín since the drug lord’s death in 1993. Muhamad bursts into laughter when I ask about the hippos and what it is like managing them, before settling into a ministerial answer. She says the African mammals are being phased out with a mixture of euthanasia, sterilisation and hippo transportation: “For us, it’s very straightforward, they are an invasive species that have been declared [as such] officially, not even by this government, by the last government. I agree with that assessment. We have already adopted in April this year the plan to manage the hippo problem,” she says.

Muhamad has lived in an eco-village in South Africa with miners, worked in human rights in Denmark and lived with campesinos in Colombia when she was a student before her first “formal” job with Shell. Now, she is preparing to be a Cop president for the first time, a role that requires her to focus on consensus and make good on her decision to leave Shell. When contact by the Guardian, the company said it is to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050 and they are investing $5.6 billion in low-carbon solutions last year, which was 23% of our capital spending.

Ultimately, she says of the vision she bought into at Shell: “I think it was greenwashing … There were people trying to push change but the regime of fossil fuels was too strong,” she says. “All of that influenced me to think that there was a more systematic change that needed to be made. And for me, the conclusion of that was politics.”

Cover photo: By The Guardian