Despite continued global investment in fossil fuel expansion, many governments are adopting policies that restrict, pause, or prohibit new fossil fuel production. These measures, ranging from moratoria on oil and gas licensing to bans on coal mining or fracking, reveal a growing willingness to engage with the supply side of the fossil fuel transition.
At the same time, short-term cycles of high oil and gas prices can create strong incentives to delay, weaken, or reverse such measures to expand production. Yet such reversals will not solve the problem of high oil and gas prices. In the United Kingdom, for example, data from Rystad Energy’s UCube shows that British projects licensed in the last 20 years have taken on average nine years to start producing. More exploration will not relieve energy pressures now.
In addition, the continued growth in production restrictions over the past decade, despite the 2022–2023 energy crisis, suggests that an increasing number of governments are beginning to look beyond these short-term signals. Instead, they are designing policies with long-term demand trends in mind, including the prospect of declining fossil fuel use and the risks of stranded assets.
Drawing on a new global database of fossil fuel production restrictions, this insight explores what these policies look like in practice, where they are emerging, and what their strengths and limitations tell us about the politics of managing decline.
Rather than reflecting a single coordinated shift, the evidence points to a fragmented but expanding policy landscape.
Headline Findings
50 Places Saying No to Expansion
The database shows a steady rise in fossil fuel production restrictions since the 1970s and a sharp rise since the 2010s. The last two years show a temporary dip, largely reflecting a wave of rollbacks linked to the repeal campaign launched by the Trump administration during his second term.
The database identifies dozens of active restrictions (58 in total) on fossil fuel production across 25 countries and 27 subnational jurisdictions across four continents. These include bans on new coal mining, moratoria on oil and gas licensing, and prohibitions on specific extraction techniques, such as fracking or specific areas (e.g., offshore exploration). While the scope of these measures varies widely, their existence signals that supply-side interventions are becoming a normalized, even if contested, policy option.
While climate mitigation is increasingly cited, many measures are grounded in broader environmental protection, water safety, land-use planning, or social issues.
In several cases, economic considerations also reinforce the case for restrictions. Many of the jurisdictions where restrictions have been introduced (e.g., frontier offshore areas, seismically active zones, or environmentally sensitive ecosystems) are also among the highest-cost locations for fossil fuel extraction. This means the expected economic returns are often uncertain or dependent on sustained high commodity prices. Also, in many of these areas, fossil fuel extraction could undermine other commercially viable activities (e.g., fishing in the Lofoten islands). As a result, cost–benefit assessments favour those precautionary restrictions.
By locating the regulation in a wider series of environmental, economic, and social issues, these considerations have sometimes enabled governments to act where explicit climate-based restrictions might have faced stronger opposition. For instance, many restrictions in the database refer only to specific extraction methods that are considered risky (e.g., fracking) but de facto mean an entire stop to exploration and new fossil fuel projects in regions where the costs of extracting the resources without those methods are too high.
Increasing Numbers of Restrictions
National-level restrictions remain relatively limited in number but are increasingly visible globally. These measures typically take the form of bans or moratoria on new exploration and licensing (e.g., Belize, France, or Costa Rica), restrictions on specific extraction methods like fracking (e.g., Bulgaria, United Kingdom, or Uruguay), or prohibitions in designated areas (e.g., the Arctic in Canada, or the Great Lakes in the United States).
Interestingly, the number of restrictions follows an exponentially growing trend over the past decade despite high oil and gas price cycles observed in this period (e.g., the price spikes observed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), which can reinforce pressures to expand production or roll back existing restriction policies.
This suggests that an increasing number of governments are beginning to look beyond misleading short-term market signals and enact policies with long-term demand trends in mind, including the prospect of declining fossil fuel use and the risks of stranded assets, the increasing importance of protecting ecologically sensitive regions, and the need to accelerate climate action both on the demand and supply side.
Importantly, many of the countries adopting such measures are early movers in international supply-side climate initiatives, including members of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. These governments have combined domestic production limits with international advocacy for a managed phase-out of fossil fuels. While their share of global fossil fuel production is small, their policies play an important role in establishing norms and policy precedents on supply-side action.
Subnational Governments Are Central Actors
A significant share of active measures originates from 27 states, provinces, or regions of nine countries. Subnational authorities have often moved first, faster, or further than national governments, particularly where political or legal constraints limit action at the centre or in countries where administrative and legal autonomy on natural resources management is ample for subnational governments. For instance, some Canadian provinces have restricted oil and gas exploration in their jurisdiction or in specific areas of high natural or cultural significance despite a traditional support to the oil and gas sector at the national level.
In some cases, regional bans or restrictions have preceded or catalyzed national debates on fossil fuel phase-out. For instance, in the United Kingdom, Scotland (2015) and Wales (2018) enacted bans on fracking, which opened the way for a national ban in 2019, and started a conversation on fossil fuels, which culminated in much more ambitious regulation in 2025 aimed at stopping new licensing for oil and gas altogether.
Measures Evolve in Two Directions
Policies restricting fossil fuel production tend to evolve along two distinct trajectories. In some jurisdictions, initial measures have been maintained over decades or even progressively strengthened by embedding them in stronger legal instruments. One example is the protection of the Lofoten Islands in Norway, which has been maintained since 2001 by successive governments. Progression in stringency can be seen in examples like the offshore Arctic oil and gas licensing ban in Canada, which started as a joint leaders’ statement in 2016 and was elevated to an executive order in 2019.
In other cases, however, restrictions have been weakened, allowed to expire, or fully repealed. We found that 15 policies that had been enacted to restrict fossil fuel production have been rolled back or repealed (sometimes in several repeal/reenactment cycles). Repeal processes often follow changes in government, energy security concerns, or legal challenges, underscoring the political fragility of production limits.
Current high oil and gas prices could create incentives to delay, weaken, or reverse measures in the name of energy security or fiscal gain, which highlights the importance of actively defending existing policies against short-term political pressures and misleading narratives. Rather than being taken for granted, these measures require continued political support, clear communication of their long-term benefits, and integration into broader transition strategies to ensure they are not easily undone.
These divergent trajectories highlight both the growing experimentation with supply-side climate policies and their political fragility. Whether restrictions endure or are rolled back frequently depends on the ability of countries to sustain political momentum and societal support around the transition away from fossil fuels, legal design, and institutional embedding.
The Legal Battleground
Our database shows that several of the repeals are currently being challenged legally. This shows that if governments want to leave open the door to policy continuity beyond their term, they should aim at enacting stronger policy instruments (e.g., executive decrees, agreements, or regulations) instead of simple policy statements. Those stronger instruments can open the door for other civil society actors to take legal action against rollbacks and repeals.
For instance, in the United States, several federal fossil fuel production restrictions from the Obama and Biden administrations have been rolled back by the Trump administration but are currently subject to litigation, stopping (or at least delaying) new investments in fossil fuel exploration and infrastructure.
Another factor that can shape the durability of fossil fuel production restrictions is the risk of claims under investor–state dispute settlement mechanisms embedded in many international investment agreements. Companies holding exploration licences, production permits, or related investments may argue that new bans or moratoria violate treaty protections such as fair and equitable treatment or protection against indirect expropriation.
Even where governments ultimately prevail, the prospect of costly arbitration can create a “regulatory chill,” discouraging policy-makers from adopting or strengthening production limits. Previous research by the International Institute for Sustainable Development highlights several ways governments can reduce this risk while preserving policy space for climate action, ensuring a legally sound oil and gas phase-out.
What Lessons Can We Learn?
The database has early examples that can help us understand how the transition away from fossil fuels (TAFF) could look on the production side. First, most measures constrain future expansion rather than existing output. Moratoria and restrictions alone will not necessarily lead to near-term production declines or a managed TAFF, especially in places where large numbers of permits have already been granted. These places will need much more comprehensive policy packages to embark on a managed TAFF. Without complementary measures, such as just transition planning, economic diversification, fiscal reform, etc., production limits can remain largely symbolic.
Second, legal form matters. Several repeals involved relatively easy procedural reversals, pointing to the need for stronger legal anchoring. Strong legal anchoring and a comprehensive scope are also needed to enforce the restrictions effectively. For instance, in 2017, the Argentine province of Entre Ríos banned fracking. However, loopholes in the regulation allow it to continue being a major supplier of the necessary raw material (silica sand) for the fracking activities in other parts of Argentina, which have grown exponentially in recent years, creating large environmental and social impacts.
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Third, production restrictions are needed to protect places of exceptional natural or cultural value. Many restrictions in the database apply to specific areas recognized for their ecological, cultural, or climatic importance (e.g., the Arctic, the Great Lakes, the Amazon, etc.). These include protected areas, Indigenous territories, water catchments, coastal zones, and biodiversity hotspots. In the context of climate change, such place-based restrictions serve a dual purpose: avoiding emissions from potential new extraction-related activities and protecting carbon sinks, whose degradation would undermine both mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Colombia’s recent restriction on fossil fuel and mining activities in the Amazon region provides a clear example of this logic by explicitly linking biodiversity conservation, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and climate objectives. However, international cooperation will be needed to effectively conserve these important biodiversity hotspots, which often span different national jurisdictions. For this, the long-standing prohibition on mineral resource activities in Antarctica under the Antarctic Treaty System offers an important precedent of how transnational areas can be protected. As governments grapple with how to operationalize a TAFF, national and international place-based restrictions may offer a promising pathway forward.
Why This Matters Now
These findings are particularly salient in the context of growing international attention to fossil fuel supply, including upcoming discussions at the First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia, and broader efforts to operationalize a TAFF at the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference and beyond.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels requires both demand- and supply-side action. Yet international frameworks have struggled to meaningfully address production, leaving domestic governments to navigate this terrain largely on their own (with a few exceptions such as Just Energy Transition Partnerships, Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s EFFECT framework). The examples in the database demonstrate that such action is politically possible.
At the same time, they also highlight how fragile and contested these measures remain, particularly in periods of high energy prices and geopolitical uncertainty like the ones we are living in now. The prevalence of repeals offers a cautionary lesson. Without stronger coordination and sustained political commitment, there is a real risk that short-term pressures could lead to the rollback of existing policies, slowing progress and undermining efforts to align fossil fuel production with long-term climate goals.
A way to prevent such repeals and entrench the restrictions would be via agreements between different jurisdictions. There are important precedents for this approach. The Antarctic Treaty System demonstrates how countries can collectively designate areas of exceptional ecological value as being off-limits to mineral resource development. Building on similar principles, initiatives such as the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative are advocating for international cooperation to halt the expansion of fossil fuel production and support a managed phase-down.
Governments can pursue bilateral agreements to lock in the measures, especially if they share borders of the no-go zones for fossil fuel exploration and production, e.g., in the Arctic or the Amazon. When neighbouring countries or regions commit jointly to protect certain areas from fossil fuel exploration and production, the political and economic incentives to roll back restrictions can be significantly reduced. Moreover, shared commitments to prohibit exploration in sensitive regions could help ensure that protections are applied consistently across jurisdictions, preventing a “race to the bottom” in which production shifts to the least regulated territory.
There is an urgent need to advance an international agenda focused on coordinated protection of key ecological areas, the closing of the fossil fuel production expansion frontier, and the development of mechanisms for a gradual, managed, and equitable decline in global fossil fuel output. As attention grows around how to operationalize such a TAFF, understanding how production limits work in practice has become increasingly important. The database compiled for this analysis provides a first systematic overview of existing, expired, and repealed restrictions on fossil fuel production worldwide, offering policy-makers and researchers a concrete evidence base to draw from.
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This article was originally published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and is republished here as part of an editorial collaboration with the IISD. It was authored by Paola Andrea Yanguas Parra and Natalie Jones.
