AUSTRALIA is not in "a lonely desert" as the only nation reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but is an emerging leader in the field, a key United Nations climate change official says.
Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said there was a misconception among many Australians that their nation was acting alone in combating the problem.
"Nothing could be further from reality," she said in a speech at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney on Wednesday.
"Every one of Australia's top trading partners has something already in place."
Ms Figueres said China had pilot emissions schemes in place in seven large cities which would go national in five years time and it was already number one in the world in renewable energy.
She said the United States had pledged to have a 17 per cent reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2020 and that was buttressed by regulations imposed on the power and transport sectors.
The European Union had 40 per cent of their emissions covered by a carbon trading scheme, South Korea was becoming a leader in green growth and India, Singapore and other countries had set impressive reduction targets, Ms Figueres said.
"Australia is not alone in acting on climate change ... in fact Australia is a major player and an emerging leader."
She challenged Australia to sign up to the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, saying it was in the country's national interest to do so.
Australia was vulnerable to climate change and to mitigate the problem globally it needed to join other countries that were aggressively working on the problem, she said.
All nations that were acting on the problem were not doing so to save the planet, Ms Figueres said, but to better their own interests in energy security and trade.
She said nations wanted to be competitive in "the low-carbon economy that's coming down the pipe".
In acting in their own national interests, nations were opening political space for a global agreement on climate change, Ms Figueres said.
Australia was a country "blessed with renewable energy capacity" and had a great opportunity to be a model for both industrialised and developing countries as to how to a harness such energy, she said.
"The world is looking very closely to see how Australia progresses with its clean energy policy."
Ms Figueres said if climate change was allowed to go on unchecked it could wipe out all the development that had taken place over the past 25 years.
"There's no plan B because we don't have a planet B," she said.
