Background
With the end of the Cold War, the bipolar superpower rivalry of yesterday has given way to regional conflicts and transnational and global issues which can affect the planet as a whole - population growth, sustainable development of agriculture, water, and other natural resources, the spread of epidemic diseases, preservation of biodiversity, pollution of the oceans, and the potential threats of climate change, to name but a few. These trends have been paralleled by large increases in global trade and commerce and a new generation of scientific and technological developments that offer great promise, as well as dangers, to the future prosperity of humankind and the welfare of the global ecosystem. In recent years U.S. foreign policy has increasingly concentrated on enhancing international cooperation to better focus our combined scientific resources on the underlying causes of these global threats, and to marshall technological assets to remediate them.