The ABC Open Public Symposium was held on September 23rd at U Thant International Hall/ United Nations University. The symposium titled: "Air Pollution in Asia and Our Life" was open to the general public and about 150 people joined this opportunity.

We first had some words from the Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and also from Japan Marine Science and Technology Center/ Frontier Research System for Global Change as an introduction. We invited three guest speakers for this special event: Dr. S.C. Lonergan from UNEP(United Nations Environment Programme), Dr. V. Ramanathan from the University of California (also the co-chair of the ABC Science Team) , and Dr. P. Crutzen the winner of the 1995 Noble Prize for chemistry and also the former director of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry, Atmospheric Chemistry Division. They made presentations about "Air pollution, economic activity and society in a Post-Johannesburg world", "Atmospheric Brown Clouds: S. Asian, Tropical & Global Impacts", and "The role of the tropics in atmospheric chemistry and climate". After a break we started again with the panel discussion with Ms. Aiko Doden a NHK news broadcaster as a coordinator. Starting with Dr. Teruyuki Nakajima (CCSR/ Tokyo University)'s talk concerning "The influence of human activity to the climate", we had some discussions about the dilemma of development, economical growth and the air pollution, environment and poverty. In this discussion, we reached a point that in order to cope with this problem, we need to make a change in peopleеs minds, and to do so, educating young people and also distributing information would be a very important factor. Some suggested the necessity of holding a symposium like this in China or in India too.

For the closing remarks, Dr. K. Suzuki from the UNU/IAS (United Nations University / Institute of Advanced Studies) made comments that the problems ABC has been working on, which links the developing and developed countries, has become more and more important. And also the importance of education for sustainable development, and improvement of research skill and transferring technology to the developing countries were pointed out. We would like to thank all of you who have joined us, and we are very happy of having this opportunity to think together about these environmental problems. We will continue to work on this problem and hope we will meet again in the near future.