Prime Minister Kevin Rudd signed the Kyoto Protocol in his first official act following the election of his centre-left Labor government in November, after his conservative predecessor John Howard refused for more than a decade.

Joining Kyoto has been hailed as an important symbolic step for Australia, which is the driest inhabited continent on Earth and contains natural treasures such as the Great Barrier Reef considered vulnerable to global warming.

Rudd said his government was already looking at taking its climate policy beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which was negotiated in 1997 and is due to expire in 2012.

"Internationally, we are now a ready and willing participant in the process to negotiate an effective post-2012 agreement," the prime minister said Friday during an official trip to Papua New Guinea.

"On the home front, we are now working towards the establishment of an emissions trading system and a 20 percent renewable energy target by 2020."

Climate experts say Australia has a long way to go, pointing out that its per capita levels of greenhouse gas emissions were the second highest in the developed world.

Andrew Macintosh, associate director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate Change Law, said the country would have no chance of meeting its Kyoto targets without generous concessions negotiated in 1997.

Macintosh said Australia "pulled a swiftie" when its Kyoto goal of capping greenhouse gas emissions to 108 percent of 1990 levels by 2012 was being hammered out.

At the time, Australia insisted it would include greenhouse gas emissions from land clearing in its 1990 total, the only industrialised nation to do so.

Macintosh said that because Australia cut down an unusually large amount of forest in 1990, the concession effectively added 129 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to Australia's 2012 emissions target.

He said without the loophole, known as the "Australia clause", the country's emissions would be about 130 percent of 1990 levels by 2012, well above the 108 percent target.

"We're actually among the worst performing countries in the world," he told AFP.

"Both energy generation and transport emissions are up substantially (since 1990), in the 30-40 percent region."

Macintosh said the Labor Party's good intentions on climate change while in opposition were likely to be scaled back now they faced the political realities of being in power.

"There's a willingness and a desire to do things, yet to temper that there's a desire to make sure they get re-elected and not spook the horses," he added.

"I have a great deal of sympathy for those in the Labor Party who really want to move things along because I don't think they have great scope to do that, at least probably well into a second term if they win the next election."

However John Connor, the chief executive of the Climate Institute, said it was too early to write off the Rudd government's commitment to climate change so early in its term.

"My feeling is that we have to wait for budgets and so forth before we can make a judgement... I think there's symbolic but also very real political and economic benefits from having ratified Kyoto," he told AFP.

The government's next major climate change test is expected to come when it commits to a 2020 emissions target later this year.

Greenpeace has called for Australia to reduce emissions by 25-40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020, but Macintosh said the government was likely to look at much more modest goals.

"Anything beyond a five percent cut I'd be reasonably surprised with. Beyond 10 percent, I don't think realistically that it's going to happen," he said.

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