BELÉM, Brazil — Dozens of governments on Tuesday urged countries to agree on a “roadmap” for phasing out coal, oil and natural gas, ratcheting up the stakes for United Nations climate change negotiations that end this week.

The call from 82 countries spanning Europe, the Pacific islands, Latin America and Africa immediately elevated the topic to the top of the COP30 agenda, making it one of the most substantial and likely divisive topics of the two-week negotiations.

One name absent from the list is the United States, the world’s top oil and gas producer, which is skipping the talks entirely.

Even so, “this is a coalition of Global North and Global South … saying with one voice that this is an issue that cannot be ignored,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said at a press conference.

The effort seeks to put teeth in a bold but nonbinding pledge from the 2023 climate summit in Dubai in which nearly 200 nations agreed to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” While it is unclear what specific language, shape or form such a template could take, the nations backing the roadmap said it would offer more tangible metrics and guideposts for realizing the goal in hopes of limiting the dangerous rise in global temperatures.

Reaching a final deal at the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, will be challenging. And it would be even more daunting to get the world’s biggest energy-producing countries and their mix of state-run and multinational fossil fuel companies to follow suit.

For one thing, production of oil and gas has only increased since 2023, and fossil fuel use has remained stubborn amid growing energy needs in the developed and developing worlds. The U.S., which backed the pledge two years ago, has renounced the idea of moving away from fossil fuels following last year’s election of President Donald Trump.

Other fossil-fuel-producing nations, such as Saudi Arabia, have attempted to frame the 2023 promise as something that falls short of a wholesale pivot away from consuming fossil fuels.

In addition, the United Nations process requires unanimity, so any one country could derail the newest proposal.

“I think it’s a little bit premature to have a roadmap when we haven’t had a discussion on what a roadmap would constitute,” Adnan Amin, the CEO of the United Arab Emirates-led Dubai summit, told POLITICO on Tuesday. “If this is going to be yet another kind of directive coming out of the process without resources attached to it, that’s going to be very difficult to agree to at this meeting.”

Global temperatures have also continued rising, hitting 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming since the preindustrial era. The 2015 Paris Agreement had set an ambitious target of limiting warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius to limit catastrophic damage, but the U.N. predicted this year that temperatures will eclipse that line.

Even so, the U.N. said, concerted action to rein in heat-trapping pollution from fossil fuels and preserve and plant forests would help limit that overshoot.

The countries supporting a roadmap away from fossil fuels said those realities demand urgency and more specificity from nations that, to date, have offered 10-year climate strategies that fall far short of the 1.5-degree goal.

“I don’t want the COP to be a failure. We want this COP to succeed and we will continue pushing for this in some form,” Kenyan climate envoy Ali Mohamed told reporters. “I’m sure there is general understanding that it is important that the decision in Dubai is taken forward.”

The coalition backing the roadmap united governments that have often been crosswise with each other on several issues at these annual talks, chiefly over who shares the burden for quickly ditching fossil fuels and how to pay for shifting to cleaner energy sources.

Poorer countries such as Sierra Leone, which still have tremendous needs to improve their access to energy, joined the call because they already spend far too much of their slim budgets adapting to the effects of a hotter planet that impose costs on their citizens, said Jiwoh Abdulai, the nation’s environment minister.

“We still need to grow our economies to lift our people out of extreme poverty. But we are coming to the table. We want to be part of the solution,” he said. “Climate action and economic growth are not mutually exclusive.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “opened the door” when he called for such a roadmap earlier this month, said Vanuatu climate envoy Ralph Regenvanu. He called Lula’s announcement a “half” surprise given that Brazil, whose Congress is controlled by an opposing coalition, has backed more oil and gas exploration.

“His country is a big fossil fuel producer,” Regenvanu said in an interview. “It’s a personal thing for him. I don’t think it necessarily reflects Brazil, but it’s so great he said it because it gives us this opportunity.”

While some fossil-fuel-producing countries may present challenges in cementing a deal, U.K. climate envoy Rachel Kyte told reporters that has always been true. Yet those same nations agreed two years ago to embark on a transition from fossil fuels, she said.

The roadmap serves to mark progress and hold nations accountable to that goal, Kyte said.

“If you make this just about one side or the other, it doesn’t work politically, but it also doesn’t work in the real world,” she said. “At the moment, there’s more people that want to move through a road map process than there are not.”

Sara Schonhardt contributed to this report.