VILLAGRAN, Mexico — Georgina Cano had long resigned herself to the stench from the hog farm just up the road from her rural home.
Stagnant lagoons of waste from thousands of squealing pigs fouled the air for miles in this flat stretch of central Mexico. Cano's three children complained and occasionally fell ill, but she figured it came with living in a region that produces much of the nation's pork.
Last year, the smell diminished even as the hog production continued.
"Now I hardly notice it," said Cano, 37, gesturing toward the low sheds about half a mile from her home. "It's healthier for the children."
Cano's family and neighbors can credit a little known Irish company for helping them to breathe easier these days.
Thanks to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international treaty on climate change, efforts by industrialized countries to fight global warming are popping up in far-flung places like Villagran, a hamlet about 40 miles southwest of the city of Queretero.
Nearly 600 Kyoto-related projects are in the pipeline in the developing world, according to a recent tally by a Danish climate research center funded in part by the United Nations. About 40% of them are in Latin America, including hydroelectric power plants in Honduras and wind-powered turbines in Chile.
The accord, which the United States has not ratified, calls for reducing overall greenhouse-gas emissions by major industrialized countries in the period 2008-2012 to amounts at least 5% below 1990 levels.
More than 150 nations have signed and ratified the treaty, but the burden to reduce emissions falls on about three dozen industrialized countries responsible for most of the climate mess. One way for industrialized countries to meet their reduction targets is to support environmental projects in developing regions. Dubbed the Clean Development Mechanism, it was designed to lower compliance costs for rich nations while funneling much-needed development to poor ones.
The climate agreement set up a trading system -- administered by the U.N. -- in which the rights to spew pollutants can be bought and sold like stocks. That has spurred interest from entrepreneurs who are funneling money into environmentally friendly projects in exchange for anti-pollution credits.
Each credit represents the equivalent of a ton of carbon dioxide kept out of the atmosphere. Although registries for these and other types of emission credits still are being set up by the U.N., buyers and sellers already are making deals.
