Before the withdrawal of the United States, only two countries declined to sign the Paris Accord: Syria and Nicaragua.
The first one was not expected to sign the deal, in fact it has been embroiled in civil war for six years. The latter took a public stand against the Paris Agreement. But why?
Paul Oquist, Nicaragua’s representative at the 2015 defined the Agreement “a path to failure” because there are no punishments for countries that fail to live up to the commitments they make. Another objection of Nicaragua is that the Deal doesn’t go far enough: limiting the increase of the world temperature of just 2 degrees is not enough. Oquist in 2015 said: “We do not want to be accomplices to the death, damages and destruction that a 3C or 4C [warmer] world will represent”.
The last reason is that the Deal doesn’t hold large countries accountable. In fact Oquist said to Democracy Now: ““[The idea of] universal responsibility — [that] everyone is responsible — is a spin on historical responsibility, because everyone didn’t create this problem”. Then he added “Nicaragua has 4.8 million tons of emissions a year, and that’s 0.03 percent of [global] emissions. Do we feel responsible for having caused climate change? No, not at all. Are we doing something about it? Yes, we’ve gone from 25 percent renewable to 52 percent renewable since 2007, and in 2020 we’ll be 90 percent renewable”.