Australia's emissions of carbon dioxide during the past 25 years have risen at almost twice the world average rate, a CSIRO analysis shows.
The country is also a poor performer in producing energy and wealth from the large amounts of fossil fuel it burns.
Michael Raupach, of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said action was needed to reduce emissions and improve efficiency. On these two criteria Australia was "more similar to developing than developed countries," Dr Raupach said.
Australia has 0.32 per cent of the world's population, yet produces 1.43 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions. This means that, per person, pollution levels are 4.5 times the global average, just below the value for the United States, the analysis shows.
Emissions have also been accelerating much faster here than in other developed countries, rising on average at twice the growth rate of the US and Japan, and five times the growth rate of Europe since the early 1980s.
Other developed countries are more efficient at producing energy from the fossil fuels they burn, with Australia using 25 to 30 per cent more fuel per unit of energy produced than the US, Europe and Japan.
The economic gain from emitting greenhouse gases is also lower here, with the amount of fossil fuel burned to create a dollar of wealth about double that of Japan and Europe and 25 per cent higher than the average.
An international study released todayon global emissions also warns that the climate change is set to exceed the worst case scenarios predicted in this year's sobering reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The study, of which Dr Raupach was a lead author, found that the growth rate of global carbon dioxide emissions has almost tripled since the 1990s, from 1.1 per cent a year to 3.1 per cent in the 2000s.
In 2005, almost 8 billion tonnes of carbon was emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, compared with 6 billion tonnes in 1995, said Dr Raupach, who is also co-chairman of the Global Carbon Project.
Chris Field, of the Carnegie Institution in the US, said global emissions since 2000 had grown faster than in the highest of the scenarios developed by the IPCC.
"We are not seeing evidence of progress in managing those emissions in either the developed or developing countries. In many parts of the world we are going backwards," said Dr Field, a lead author of the study, published today in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Since the start of the industrial revolution, the US and Europe have accounted for more than 50 per cent of the accumulated global emissions, while China has accounted for less than 8 per cent, the study shows.
The 50 least developed countries have produced only about 0.5 per cent of the total in the past 200 years.
Although China's emissions have recently accelerated rapidly, along with its expanding economy, they are still below the global average, said Dr Raupach.
"On average, each person in Australia and the US now emits more than five tonnes of carbon a year, while in China the figure is only one tonne per year.
He said that in addition to reinforcing the urgency of the need to reduce emissions, an important outcome of the new study was to show that carbon emissions have a history.
"We have to take both present and past emissions trajectories into account in negotiating global emissions reductions. To be effective, emissions reductions have to be both workable and equitable," he said.