South Africa has broken ranks with other large developing-world greenhouse emitters and announced it will set limits on its emissions and begin to wean itself of cheap coal for energy.

The country’s environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said the government had agreed to take measures to ensure that greenhouse gas emissions stabilised between 2020 and 2025, Bloomberg reports. Absolute reductions in emissions would have to begin ten years after their growth was halted, the minister said.

A shift in climate and energy policy sees the government aiming to boost electricity production from renewable sources and requiring future coal-fired power stations to be enabled for carbon capture and storage technology.

It also has Treasury investigating a carbon tax and looking to make energy efficiency measures mandatory. Van Schalkwyk said draft plans would be revealed next year and new climate change laws would be in place by 2012.

Significantly, van Schalkwyk acknowledged that developing countries like South Africa had to do their part in curbing global greenhouse gas emissions - to help “limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.'' Without government intervention in South Africa emissions could quadruple by 2050, he said, according to Associated Press reports.

South Africa is among the top five developing world emitters and, like China and India, is calling on developed countries take the first steps toward serious emissions reductions. They agree with the EU that rich countries should cut emissions by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

This position, and the United States’ refusal to consider such targets commitments unless China and India do too, has produced a three-year stalemate in UN negotiations to find a successor for the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

These negotiations have a deadline of December 2009 and it appears perhaps the only hope of a breakthrough is if rich countries adopt binding absolute targets and developing countries adopt at least some form of emissions curbs. The latest domestic policy shift by South Africa to suggest such limits may increase the pressure on China and India to do the same.

The big developing world emitters have so far steadfastly maintained that it is unfair to ask their people to take on climate change measures that would impede economic growth and their rise from poverty. But South Africa’s new stance suggests it has softened its position.

"We are saying to business and society at large that we have to move away from dirty coal as a dominant energy source," van Schalkwyk said. "The longer we wait the more expensive it will become," AP reports him saying at a news conference.