Twenty years after the first Earth Summit, scientists have made limited progress in evaluating and mitigating the environmental costs to growth and development. We will use the Rio+10 Earth Summit, slated to occur in summer of 2002, as the topical focus of the series. The mission of the Passport Series is simple: to increase awareness of, participation in, and education at the University of Minnesota about the primary international effort to protect the environment through sustainable growth and development practices.

Our goals for Passport to Earth Summit 2002 series are as follows:

• Communicate the history, current status of, and controversies about the implementation of Sustainable Development Strategies based on international agreements regarding environment and development made in the past ten years (Agenda 21)
• Strike balance and show diversity in the representation of perspectives addressed within each theme
• Touch on local, national and international scales of policy and activity in each event
• Encourage presenters to explicitly provide their definition of sustainable development
• Design events to incorporate or culminate an action item, which may be in the form of a final resolution mutually agreed upon by panelists