When President Donald Trump announced the US would be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, he put America in the company of just two other countries that are not signatories to the agreement: Nicaragua and Syria.

Syria has been torn apart by a civil war which has raged since 2011. With thousands dead and accusations of atrocities committed by both sides, the country is under sanctions which make it difficult for its leaders to travel abroad.

But the reason for Nicaragua refusing to sign the deal is less obvious.

The small Central American nation refused to sign in 2015 because it did not think the deal went far enough.

Nicaraguan lead envoy Paul Oquist called the Paris agreement "a path to failure" that lets big polluters off the hook when speaking to Climate Home on the sidelines of the 2015 talks.

"We don't want to be an accomplice to taking the world to 3 to 4 degrees and the death and destruction that represents," Mr Oquist said.

"It's a not a matter of being trouble makers, it's a matter of the developing countries surviving."

Mr Oquist said the world's 10 biggest carbon polluters accounted for 72 per cent of historical emissions, while the 100 smallest were responsible for just 3 per cent.

Nicaragua contributes 0.03 per cent of global emissions, according to the European Commission' Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research.

The Central American nation is one of the most vulnerable nations to climate change, ranking fourth in the world most affected by extreme weather events, according to the Global Climate Risk Index 2017.

Between 1996 and 2015 Nicaragua was hit with 44 extreme weather events, including floods, droughts and forest fires.