‘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 sug

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