South Africa will probably soon join developed countries in committing itself to meeting targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
An intriguing sign of the country's changing environmental status is that United States President George Bush wants it to be among about 15 others involved in devising a long-term plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
Bush wants to get the talks started this year. In December, negotiations will begin in Bali to thrash out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
Like China, India and other developing economies, South Africa has been exempted from Kyoto's first round of emission cuts. But, like its counterparts, it is expected to join the 35 developed-nation signatories to the protocol and commit itself to reduction targets next time around.
Bush has been severelycriticised for keeping the US out of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires its signatories to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to about five percent of their 1990 levels by 2012. One of his objections was that signing the protocol would put the US at a disadvantage to countries such as China and India, which were exempted from its targets.
Now Bush is proposing getting the world's most industrialised and most polluting countries to set a "long-term global goal" for reducing greenhouse gases.
As well as South Africa and the G8 group of industrialised nations, the participants in the meeting Bush proposes would include China, India, Australia, Brazil, Mexico and South Korea.
Announcing his new initiative, Bush said the US would work with other nations "to establish a new framework for greenhouse-gas emissions for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012".
He made the announcement in a speech in which he outlined his agenda for this week's G8 summit in Germany.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the G8 president, reportedly wants the G8's leaders to come up with a powerful declaration on climate change at the summit that the US might not find palatable.
President Thabo Mbeki's spokesperson, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said the Bush proposal was "certainly something that the government would be interested in studying".
The international response to the Bush plan has been mixed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has described the Bush proposal as "a huge step forward". To him, its significance is that it demonstrates that the US accepts climate change as a real problem, and he says it is incumbent on the US to offer leadership on the issue.
But the South African Climate Action Network urged Mbeki "not to be blinded" by Blair to Bush's "real intent", which it said was to ensure that the negotiation of a post-2012 climate regime was on US terms. The group said the multilateral UN Framework Convention for Climate Change was the proper forum for negotiating a post-Kyoto agreement.
On the other hand, Bush's remarks drew enthusiastic support from Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN body.
"It is good that the US is showing leadership in energising the debate" on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, he said.
"This is more ambitious than my wildest dreams."