CANBERRA, March 29 (Reuters) - Australia, which refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, will ask other nations to contribute to a new fund to combat deforestation and global warming, Prime Minister John Howard said on Thursday.

Howard said his government would contribute A$200 million ($161 million) over five years to a fund to help stop forest destruction and would ask other countries including Germany, the United States and Britain to do the same.

"What this initiative will do, in a shorter period of time, is make a greater contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions than in fact the Kyoto Protocol," he said.

Howard's comments came a day after he rejected a personal plea from British climate economist Nicholas Stern to urgently ratify the Kyoto Protocol and slash greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60 percent by 2050 to help fight global warming.

Australia, along with the Washington, has refused to ratify the Kyoto pact, which sets goals for lowering greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warning, and refused to impose binding targets on carbon emissions.

Howard said Stern's warning that inaction could be catastrophic should not be treated as a "holy writ".

"I accept that climate change is a big issue, I'm not walking away from it, but I am not going to compromise the economic strengths of our country and put at risk thousands of jobs by commitment to a target that is unreasonably short, unreasonably harsh," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"FOREST FOOL"

Opposition Greens Senator Bob Brown said that after six years of drought and with climate change shaping up as a key issue in elections later this year, Howard was trying to burnish his climate credentials.

"Our prime minister is a forest fool. It's a stunning piece of hypocrisy that he is putting $200 million into stopping forest burning in Southeast Asia while he is authorising forest burning in southern Australia," Brown told reporters.

Australia's Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Canberra's forest fund money would be mostly spent in neighbouring Indonesia, where illegal logging is stripping 2.1 million ha (5.2 million acres) of forest every year in trade worth $4 billion.

"The biggest deforesters in the world or the places where the most deforestation of tropical forests is occurring are in Brazil and Indonesia, they're the top two so naturally our focus is going to be on our part of the world," he said.

The new fund will be modelled on an Asia-Pacific climate pact drawing together six of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters -- Australia, China, the United States, Japan, India and South Korea -- and dubbed the "pack of dirty polluters" by environmentalists.

The fund would be managed by the World Bank and would operate outside the Kyoto pact, Turnbull said.

($1=A$1.24)

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