very day the news media bombard us with a dizzying stream of stories and information on the state of our planet. Depletion of the ozone layer, global warming, expanding deserts, deforestation of tropical rainforests, loss of biodiversity and the list goes on. In response to these potentially catastrophic and complex problems, Canadians are asking some basic questions: Why are all of these problems suddenly appearing? Are they related to each other or to some common cause? Are they really as serious as the media are leading us to believe? How are they going to affect us as Canadians and perhaps most importantly, how should we respond to them?

In science, seemingly simple questions such as these are often the most difficult to answer. The global problems currently facing our society are highly complex and so large that they require major international initiatives to understand and respond to them. Scientists have as yet only been able to scratch the surface of most of these issues. Still, the preliminary answers indicate that society must act quickly, for we run the risk of causing irreparable damage to the planet's life support systems.

This report has been produced by the Canadian Global Change Program of the Royal Society of Canada to answer some of the basic questions being asked by Canadians about global change issues. It has been written with such Canadians in mind -- people who are concerned about global change issues and want to understand more about what they are and how they are related to one another. There is a danger associated with producing a primer document such as this because a large number of very complex topics must be clearly explained in very few pages. The danger is that issues may be presented in an over simplified or black and white fashion. Although we have attempted to present as many sides of each issue as space would allow, it is inevitable that some readers will feel that the issues have not been fairly or adequately presented. We apologize to those readers, but the Royal Society of Canada believes that the benefits of presenting the broad perspective on global change issues to as wide an audience as possible outweigh the costs of including too much detail and making the report too dense for the average reader. We have included a list of further reading on page 54 for readers who wish to obtain more information on the topics that we have discussed.

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