‘But we’re just 1% of emissions’: do smaller countries’ climate efforts matter?

On first hearing, it is a position that sounds reasonable. “When our share of global emissions is less than 1%,” Rishi Sunak argued when he was the UK prime minister in 2023, “how can it be right that British citizens are now being told to sacrifice even more than others?” Sunak is not the only world leader to have cited such figures while delaying cuts to pollution. In 2019, Scott Morrison, Australia’s then prime minister, used his country’s 1.3% of global emissions to reject any suggestion Australia was not “doing our bit” on climate breakdown. In July, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, pointed to his country’s 2% share of global emissions while supporting loopholes in European climate targets. A few months later the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, followed suit, flagging the EU’s 6% share. Small-emitting nations account for 32% of global emissions More radical demands were heard in a radio interview last month with Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister who has consulted for petrostates since leaving office, who used the UK’s 1% share to urge it to abandon clean economy targets . Often presented next to the vast emissions from the US, China and India, which are collectively responsible for just over half of carbon pollution today, the claim that a country is “just 1% of emissions” has been used to suggest small but wealthy countries cannot stop the worsening of extreme weather events, such as the heatwave scorching Europe . …