As a deadline looms to submit its greenhouse gas emissions target under the Copenhagen Accord, the Green Party is urging the Government to sign on the dotted line.
However, Prime Minister John Key recently made it clear that he saw the January 31 deadline as movable and New Zealand would not be signing until its conditions were met.
Among the Government's concerns is that it wants rules altered so forests planted pre-1990 can be harvested and re-planted elsewhere in the country. It also wants a change to the rules around wood so that emissions are not counted if felled wood is to be used, for example, in furniture rather than burnt.
New Zealand made progress on those issues at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen last month but nothing was ratified.
New Zealand's conditional target for reducing climate harming emissions is to reach 10-20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
At a media conference earlier this month Mr Key said he did not expect to be signing up by the initial deadline: "Eventually we are going to sign it... we are going to work our way through negotiations."
Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said that position cast doubt on the Government's intent to tackle climate change. He admitted January 31 would be seen as a "soft deadline" but missing it was not a good signal.
The Government was worried about restrictions on the ability of New Zealand to meet targets by importing emissions credits, Dr Norman said.
"If every country takes the approach of importing carbon credits rather than actually cutting domestic emissions, then we will fail to cut greenhouse emissions globally. Our children will inherit the result," Dr Norman said.
The UN talks ended with a bare-minimum agreement that fell well short of countries' original goals after prolonged negotiations failed to paper over differences between rich nations and the developing world.
Critics have complained the explicit deal struck to limit global warming to 2degC provided no details of how this goal would be reached, and that the emission cuts that were promised would be insufficient to get there.
NZPA