JEJU, South Korea -- Fifty years ago, South Korea was poorer than Sudan. Now it is a global industrial powerhouse, and South Korean leaders this week said they hope the country's new climate change legislation sends a powerful message to far wealthier countries like the United States.

The law, approved in May, would launch an economywide carbon market by 2015. South Korean Environment Minister Young-sook Yoo, in an interview with ClimateWire during the International Union for Conservation of Nature's World Conservation Congress here, noted that the United States is not the only country to face resistance from business groups to curbing greenhouse gas emissions and praised her country for stepping up to the challenge.

"Our domestic industries always gave us a sense of resentment," she explained. "They are saying no other advanced countries in the world are trying this, so why Korea? But the Korean government has a different point of view.

"From a global viewpoint, our level of CO2 consumption is very small, but we see the challenge of climate change as a global problem that we must all tackle together," Yoo said. "We saw this as a future pathway Korea should take."

As South Korea grew to become Asia's fourth-largest economy, its emissions also jumped -- to about 640 million tons in 2011 from 350 million tons just two decades earlier. Recently, though, it also has become ambitious about mitigating climate change.

The South Korean government has pledged to reduce emissions 30 percent from projected business-as-usual levels by 2020. The cap-and-trade scheme, aimed at helping South Korea achieve its emission cuts, will cover more than 450 entities emitting more than 25,000 tons of CO2 each year.

Yoo said the law is still being finalized. The trading system will operate in three phases, and the government is expected to allocate more than 95 percent of carbon allowances for free under the system during the first two phases, and auction the rest.

She said it is too soon to know whether South Korea will link its market to the European Union's -- something the European Union, already planning links to Australia's market, has indicated it wants to see.

"We have very significant challenges to take on first," Yoo said. "The decision on when we will join the international market will have to be decided after the implementation of the law."

Baffled by U.S. failure to lead

Soogil Young, co-chairman of South Korea's Presidential Committee on Green Growth, said he believes the carbon trading system will create a bigger market for cleaner technologies, which in turn "will create new growth engines and new jobs." He said he was baffled by U.S. inaction on climate change.

"Traditionally, the United States has been the hegemonic solution to all global problems. It hasn't been like that lately," Young said, adding, "I'm afraid that even China is getting ahead of the United States."

Meanwhile, South Korea has also taken on ambitious levels of investment in low-carbon technology, reforestation and other measures the government has rolled into a "green growth" plan. In 2009, the government pledged to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product annually on lower-carbon living, a choice that has been widely touted here.

It is also vying to host the Green Climate Fund, a multibillion-dollar fund to be formally launched this year aimed at helping vulnerable countries reduce the threat of climate change and develop cleaner energy trajectories.

South Korea was one of the first countries, along with Mexico and Germany, to pledge money to the fund, which is still an empty shell. Yoo said she thinks South Korea's "unique experience" of having made its way into middle-income nation status could help ease perennial climate talk tensions between developed and developing nations.

"We see Korea being in a very ideal position. We can play a bridging role," she said. "We try our best to contribute to the international community, and maybe we make an example to other countries."

But South Korea's plans are not without controversy. The Korean Environmental NGOs Network, a coalition of more than 30 environmental groups in the country, slammed the government's "green growth" plans as "nothing more than a euphemistic slogan to obfuscate massive environmental destruction."

Specifically, the groups charged that a $19 billion "green growth" project under which South Korea's four largest rivers were dredged and dammed was an environmental disaster. They also are fighting plans to ramp up nuclear power plants and a deeply controversial plan to build a naval base on Jeju island, where the conservation meeting is being held.

"The Korean public knows that the slogan 'green growth' means green washing," the environmental groups charged.

Yoo said she believes South Korea is trying to act fast and first on a critical global problem that is seeing little traction inside the international negotiating halls.

"Looking out over the next several years, we can feel the real damages of climate change," she said. "That's the most crucial thing for the entire global community to do is to take action, not just at the negotiations but on the ground."