This workshop is one of a number of activities planned for IITAP's Thrust Area in Environmental and Earth Sciences, and it is typical of the activities we envision for this area of IITAP, because it offers an opportunity to apply basic physical science principles to the study of environmental problems that are common to both developed and developing countries.

We feel that the environmental sciences offer unique opportunities for IITAP to promote science infrastructure in developing countries. Access to clean air, safe drinking water, and an adequate supply of nutritious food are goals of both developed and developing countries. Environmental modeling, of the kind practiced by scientists in this room, offers tools for local policy makers to choose the more sustainable options for achieving these goals during the process of economic development.

A second reason for pursuing the environmental sciences under IITAP is that each country has unique climatic, geological, geographical, and biopheric characteristics that are of interest to scientists outside as well as inside these countries. By bringing his or her unique environmental datasets, scientists from the developing countries come as equal partners to the international collaboration and thereby will be motivated to retain ties to their native lands and sources of data.

We have assembled in this room representatives of a cross-section of the major regional climate modeling research groups in the world. Our purpose is to design a model intercomparison project that will help us evaluate these models and produce new ones. We have some scientists from developing countries at this meeting, and it is our intent to engage many more such people when the project is underway so that they can learn the modeling process by active participation.

The models used by many people in this room are more computationally demanding than even global climate models. This fact has limited their operational platforms to supercomputers - that is,until very recently. Powerful computer workstations now can be used for these simulations, which potentially makes these models accessible to scientists from developing countries. As computing power continues to advance, these developing-country partners will become even more actively engaged in climate modeling.

Discussions I have had with some of our workshop participants indicates to me that the IITAP motivation to engage scientists from developing countries into our project adds urgency and incentive to what we do. We look forward to working with each other, with scientists from developing countries, and with UNESCO as our project gets underway.

We thank you for visiting our workshop, and we would like to help answer any questions you may have about our work.