Activities of the Working group "Science and Urgent Problems of Society" for the period after the 1st General Assembly in Strasbourg were aimed at three directions.

First, our main activity addresses analysis and selection of superproposals, which are multidisciplinary, pan-European and directed toward solving urgent societal problems. Several proposals were received so far: "Detailed Earthquake Scenarios for European cities" suggested by F. Wenzel (Germany); "Ground Motion Modelling and Prediction of Natural Catastrophes" by G. Panza (Italy), "North oceanic passage: Shortest way from London to Tokyo in XXIst century" by Ye. Velikhov (Russia), and "Network in Europe for investigation of the impacts of rapid climate change in sedimentary basins" by A. Fard (Sweden). The leaders of the proposals had asked Euroscience or at least our Working Group to be an umbrella organisation ready to host the superprojects. The questions arise: could Euroscience be an umbrella organisation for pan-European superprojects as an informational sponsor? And does the European Science Foundation has to play solely such a role as well as a financial sponsor of the projects. This problem should be discussed during the General Assembly.

Second activity of the Working group was to establish links with European institutions dealing with urgent problems of society. We are setting up links with the Climate Network in Europe (Brussels) the main goal of which is to promote action to limit human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels. The WG contacted the INTAS (Brussels) suggesting a superproposal for interdisciplinary and international European program on the Aral Sea. We are establishing contacts with the Program of Risk, Modelling and Policy at the International Institute for Applied System Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. Also we are in a close relationship with the Program of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences "Science for survival and sustainable development".

And the third activity was to contact by email discussing news in the urgent scientific problems and science policy in this direction.

In future we hope to work at these three directions and to set up local subgroups in each regional section.