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

Residential housing in the village of Drax, near the Drax power station in North Yorkshire, UK. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Residential housing in the village of Drax, near the Drax power station in North Yorkshire, UK. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Analysis ‘But we’re just 1% of emissions’: do smaller countries’ climate efforts matter? Ajit Niranjan Europe environment correspondent Past and present leaders of wealthy nations such as UK and Germany have argued their actions are insignificant 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 . “Even if we were all climate neutral in Germany tomorrow,” Merz said last summer, “not a single natural disaster would be prevented anywhere in the world.” But does the position hold up on closer examination? Climate scientists point to the much larger historical emissions of these countries – the metric that matters most for global heating – as well as the fact that these countries have more money to cut pollution. Per person, European countries have contributed a disproportionate amount to emissions, and progress in cleaning their economies is only now bringing annual emissions close to the global average. “These leaders wouldn’t like it if the top 1% of their wealthiest citizens didn’t pay their taxes, so the argument is fallacious and simply buck-passing,” said Prof Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds. “Future warming is driven by future emissions, so every tonne of carbon dioxide that a country or citizen can avoid emitting will improve temperature and he