By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO, March 29 (Reuters) - Developing countries are doing almost as much as rich nations to slow global warming, often as a side-effect of curbs on rising energy use, the head of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Thursday.

Achim Steiner said countries such as China, Brazil or South Africa should get more credit for tougher fuel efficiency for cars or curbs on deforestation. Such measures might be building blocks for a global deal to fight climate change beyond 2012.

"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 $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 U.S. 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.

Climate scientists say that emissions from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars are "very likely" to be the main cause of global warming in recent decades and could bring more storms, droughts and rising seas.

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