Efforts are underway to convert 20,000 hectares of Brazilian pastureland back into the rich forest ecosystem it once was. Picking up the bill are polluting companies that want what is known as a carbon dioxide “sink” to clean up their sins against the environment. This is one of the many greenhouse gas mitigation projects being carried out around the world, under the special mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, an agreement that has yet to be ratified.

The pastureland reconversion plan is centered in the area of the southeastern Brazilian city of Curitiba with a price tag of 20 million dollars.

Financing the initiative are the U.S.-based corporations ChevronTexaco, General Motors and American Electric Power, which are warming their engines for the potential enactment of the Kyoto Protocol.

The mechanism must be ratified by 55 countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and whose combined greenhouse gas emissions represent at least 55 percent of the world total.

Ratification of the protocol is now in the hands of an indecisive Russia. The United States, alone responsible for 25 percent of emissions, has refused to support the treaty.

The Protocol contains legally binding goals under which industrialized countries are to reduce emissions by 2008-2012 of six types of greenhouse gases by at least five percent with respect to their 1990 levels.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries can attain their goals by trading emissions credits. The buying and selling of these credits, joint implementation projects (like that underway in Curitiba), and so-called “clean development” are the three established mechanisms.

Through these channels, a country that helps reduce emissions in others is given credit towards its reduction objectives stated in the treaty.

However, this does not exempt the country from reducing greenhouse gas production — at least in part — at home.

The World Bank's Prototype Carbon Fund, create in 2000, is a public-private initiative for clean development and aims to reduce poverty.

Its projects generate certified emissions credits that are purchased by the fund and then distributed among the participants, which can use them to meet their greenhouse gas reduction goals.

In the private sector, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development alongside the World Resources Institute in 1998 launched a greenhouse gas initiative aimed at developing practices that help companies monitor and report their emissions.

In early December the World Economic Forum announced the creation of a global greenhouse gas registry to facilitate management of companies' emissions worldwide. The information will be available on the Internet.

More information on climate change and greenhouse gases, as well as the market for emissions credits can be found on the websites for the Secretariat of the Convention on Climate Change (and the recent COP9 meeting), and the International Emissions Trading Association.