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

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.

More radical demands were heard in a radio interview in May 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 heatwave outcomes for generations.”

The three most populous countries in the world – the US, China and India – were the only ones individually responsible for more than 5% of the carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels in 2024.

But while each of the remaining 194 countries can indeed claim to be less than 5% of the problem, together they are responsible for just under half of humanity’s yearly emissions.

Despite this, the argument has been used to justify delaying action by the governments of some of the biggest polluters. More recently, it has found a home with nationalist-populist parties across the continent. The far-right leaders and energy spokespeople of western Europe’s five biggest economies – the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy – have all used the argument to justify calls to weaken climate policy in the last two years.

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Further analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a thinktank, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found 200 examples of such claims being made in national newspapers of 27 countries responsible for less than 2% of global CO2 emissions last year. Among the examples is an editorial in the British newspaper the Times, in March 2025, that stated: “Climate change is clearly a problem, yet Britain, which contributes around 1% of global emissions, can do little to stop it.”

A YouGov poll for the ECIU in April found one in four Britons think countries emitting less than 1% of emissions should stop trying to reduce them. The share was highest among voters of Reform UK, of which half thought such countries should not continue cutting emissions. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, said in an interview with the BBC last year that it was “absolutely mindless” for a country that produced less than 1% of global CO2 to “beggar itself”.

Dr Ella Gilbert, a climate scientist and ECIU board member, said: “The climate crisis is a global problem and every country should be acting to reduce emissions and build a greener global economy, especially those with the largest historical responsibility, like the UK. The climate doesn’t care where carbon comes from – whether [it’s] from multiple countries responsible for smaller proportions of emissions, or China.”

Gilbert said the science was clear that curbing emissions by reaching net zero was the only way to restore the climate and avoid dangerous tipping points. “The UK may account for just 1% of current global emissions, but we’re responsible for 100% of our own emissions, and we have the opportunity to show global leadership by bringing them down.”