The Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg has said she will not attend the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November, saying the uneven distribution of Covid-19 vaccines would mean countries could not participate on even terms.

The 18-year-old activist said that by November richer countries would be vaccinating young healthy people “very often at the expense of people in at-risk groups in other parts of the world”.

“With the extremely inequitable vaccine distribution I will not attend the Cop26 conference if the development continues as it is now,” Thunberg said.

Confirming a BBC report, Thunberg said the conference should be postponed “if everyone could not attend in the same terms”. The conference has already been postponed once as it was originally planned for November 2020.

However, the campaigner said she did not rule out reversing her decision if vaccine access improved.

“Of course, I would love to attend the Cop26. But not unless everyone can take part on the same terms,” she said.

Thunberg, who began campaigning against the climate emergency in 2018 at the age of 15, has earned Amnesty International’s top human rights prize and the Swedish Right Livelihood award. In 2019, she was named person of the year by Time magazine.