"Developing countries have been doing a lot" to slow a rise in emissions of greenhouse gases, he told Reuters during a conference in Oslo about promoting economic growth while safeguarding the environment.

"Since 1990 developing countries have reduced their emissions pathway in such a way that it is almost equivalent to what (rich nations) committed to under the Kyoto Protocol, in millions of tonnes," he said of preliminary data.

Kyoto binds most industrialised nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. A UNEP official said commitments totalled more than 800 million tonnes a year.

Developing countries have no goals for limiting emissions under Kyoto and talks on getting them more involved beyond 2012 are stalled.

But Steiner said they were slowing rising energy use, often as a reaction to oil prices at around US$68 a barrel. Use of fossil fuels is widely blamed for stoking global warming.

"Recognising what they have done might change the perception in the West that the Chinas and the Brazils and South Africas are not interested and haven't done anything," he said.

"This is part of the key to unlocking the climate negotiations, to shift the focus...to what countries are doing in their domestic agendas that's relevant," he said.

BUSH

He said it was wrong to believe that poor nations would not take part beyond 2012 simply because the United States, the biggest emitter, opposed Kyoto. President George W. Bush pulled out in 2001, saying Kyoto would cost US jobs and wrongly excluded developing nations until 2012.

China, for instance, has set goals for reducing the amount of carbon emitted per unit of economic output.

And India has limited growth of energy use to 3.7 percent a year, far below economic growth of 8 percent, Surya Sethi, an energy adviser to the Indian Government Planning Commission, told the Oslo conference.

Steiner said Brazil had slowed emissions from deforestation in the Amazon basin -- trees store carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, when they grow and release it when they rot. Brazil is also a leader in biofuel use.