Cape Town - South Africa is expected to be "neutral" in terms of contributions and benefits from the Green Climate Fund, Planning Minister
Trevor Manuel said on Friday after he was elected co-chairperson of the new United Nations body.
"South Africa and a number of other developing countries are expected to be neutral in the global context," Manuel told a media briefing.
"I think the sense of the way in which we structured the advisory group on finance is that there should be a scoring system so that the words new and additional finance are actually quite central to the Copenhagen accord.
"For developing countries that emit we should be able to score this against our own development.
"We would not be expected to raise carbon taxes in South Africa to finance some climate proofing in Sweden, for instance. Rather, we would score it against our own needs and this is where the policy paper, the discussion paper released by National Treasury on environmental taxes, would be quite important."
Manuel added that South Africa was "caught in a bind" in that it was a poor country whose emissions per gross domestic product (GDP) were "relatively high", but stressed that the government was obliged to adhere to pledges to reduce emissions.
The former finance minister was elected on Thursday night to co-chair the Transitional Committee for the Green Climate Fund alongside Mexican Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero Arroyo and Norway's State Secretary for Finance Kjetil Lund.
The committee must design the governance model for the fund set up under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as agreed at the 16th Conference of the Parties in Cancun in 2010, mobilise resources for it and set out the modalities for disbursing the money.
The fund has been promised $100bn of annual grants by 2020, which is more than the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and allied regional banks put together.
Manuel said he believed that collecting the pledged funds would prove "feasible but challenging".
He said he hoped that the committee could complete its work ahead of the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) to be held in Durban from November 28 to December 9 in search of a binding long-term plan of action on combatting climate change.
Manuel said he believed that South Africa, in particular as the country hosting the next round of the talks, needs to raise the national level of debate on climate change.
"That is an issue that has not been sufficiently debated in South Africa, and let me put in this plea, we need to be debating these issues."
His appointment has been criticised by environmental activists because of his "neo-liberal" economic stance.
He said on Friday that it would be naive to focus solely on the damage multi-national companies had caused in the developing world, noting that they had been allowed to bend the rules even in the United States.