Burning off methane gas in South Florida landfills and sewage plants has been going on for years -- sometimes just to get rid of the stinking gas, sometimes to convert it into energy to run a power plant, as is happening in 12 places in the state. In either case, no one pays much attention to how much gas is burned.

But in the cleanup of a Brazilian dump, the precise amount of gas burned off is crucial and must be measured by U.N.-approved auditors and engineers. That amount is then converted into carbon credits, which the Japanese company can use to offset its own pollution or sell the credits in the growing carbon markets.

While simple in theory, the reality is much more complex. ''There's a lot of research. There are contracts,'' said Al Vasquez of AgCert Services.

Many landfill and power projects mean dealing with the governments that own them, and that could sometimes involve under-the-table requests for payments by some officials.

''You have to be careful,'' said Vasquez, particularly because some people will claim that they own the right to the carbon credits from a property when they don't. ``You have to do a lot of due diligence. We want to work with the entity that has the emissions license.''

''Decision-making in Latin America'' can be very difficult,'' said Monroy, partly because of complex bureaucracies. In China, with its authoritarian government, ``it can take two months to develop a plan. It's one year or more in Latin America.''

Another issue is financing. Few entities in Latin America have the money to finance Kyoto projects on their own, so developers like MGM International look for investments from European or Japanese firms that want the credits.

What's more, negotiations with Latin American entities are harder, said Jamine Haneef of TFS Energy, a firm involved in carbon trading. The reason is that many Latin Americans have a ''relatively high expectation of prices'' for the resulting carbon credits, which are trading for about $10 a ton, although there is a wide fluctuation in contracts from $3 to $25.

Even so, the riskiness of developing world markets means that the prices are considerably below the $35 that carbon is trading for in the European market, which has its own requirements for reducing greenhouse gases.

`LOW-HANGING FRUIT'

Monroy said that for several years, his firm concentrated on ''the low-hanging fruit'' in Latin America, particularly removing hydrofluorocarbons from industrial plants, because these gases cause 11,700 times as much global warming as does the more prevalent carbon dioxide and thus earn much larger carbon bonuses.

''Those projects are pretty much gone,'' said Vasquez, of AgCert. His company has done much of its work in Brazilian farming operations. AgCert puts livestock and pig manure into lined pits about the size of Olympic swimming pools and then burns off the methane.

While each of these pits is small, the firm aggregates many of them into a project to make for a sizable number of credits. AgCert reports that it has registered 85 projects for work at more than 600 locations in Latin America.

Last December, representatives of 190 countries met in Bali, Indonesia, to discuss what to do after the Kyoto agreement ends in 2012. Developed countries insisted that more must be done by the so-called ''Plus Five'' countries -- China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.

Those countries, considered by Kyoto to be developing nations, are responsible for emitting 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, according to Figueres, the board member of the Clean Development Mechanism.

Leaders in Europe and elsewhere want those five countries to take responsibility for cleaning up emissions and not simply wait for foreign investment to do so. The five countries said that was unfair. They said the burden needs to remain on the major developed nations.

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