Joelle Chassard, who manages the World Bank's carbon finance business, acknowledged the present process is cumbersome, and said the international institution is exploring a scaled-up approach meant to cut through red tape.

"The obvious thing is to see whether we can move from working on one project at a time and take a look at more programmatical sectors or perspectives on this," Chassard said at the Reuters Global Environment Summit.

She said this could mean that "over time we stop counting every tonne that is reduced ... and focus on trends."

The World Bank is proposing to set up a new facility to develop this approach.

Such schemes are bogged down, with project developers forced to wait months for UN officials to approve their emissions cuts.

LARGER, LONG-TERM DEVELOPMENT

The new approach would not measure cuts in climate-warming carbon dioxide on every project, but instead would offer carbon offsets to developing countries that, for example, beat targets for energy efficiency or carbon intensity -- the measure of emissions reduced as related to economic growth.

"You would not look at every plant, every physical installation, but you would look at the trends that have occured for the sector," Chassard said.

"It's just a very rough idea, but it's really trying to see how we can encourage our client countries to opt for a development strategy that would have a lower carbon intensity, and it may be one sector at a time," she said.

Chassard acknowledged that critics may question whether some countries can be relied upon to measure their own performance, but said the project was aimed at cutting transaction costs of the carbon program and ultimately curbing emissions in parts of the world that feel the impact of global warming most.

"We have tried to do it on a project basis," she said. "Now we want to think about how these carbon constraints are integrated into the decision-making process for larger, long-term development programs."

Asked about citizens of developing countries, who may be more concerned about immediate, local needs than long-term global climate change, Chassard said most of those who live in the developing world are already aware of the problem.

"I think in many of these countries, they do care about their children and their children's children, so even if they are not around at the end of the century, they are aspiring to a better future, especially when their present condition is very, very fragile," she said. (For summit blog: http://summitnotebook.reuters.com/) (Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Eric Walsh)