This volume gives the proceedings of the third conference of the series “Sharing knowledge across the Mediterranean”, which was organized jointly by the AFAS, the French association for the advancement of sciences, and the University Hassan II of Casablanca and which was held in this city on September, 5th to 7th 2005. This conference was sponsored by a dozen of organizations, among which NATO, which decided to make it as an Advanced Scientific Workshop.

In addition to the opening session, nine different sessions were organized, with the following topics:

• Session 1: Extension of the European space for research to the Mediterranean zone,

• Session 2: New energies for development,

• Session 3: Participation of scientist from the South to international projects: SESAME,

• Session 5: From food security to food safety in the Euro Mediterranean space,

• Session 6: Fighting the numerical divide,

• Session 7: Participation of scientist from the South to international projects: CERN,

• Session 8: Desalination of sea water and recycling of waste water,

• Session 9: Natural risks in the Mediterranean.

Session 4 dealt with possible future topics and is not reported here, as it was mainly in the form of an open discussion.

Authors were requested to write down their own contribution. Some have kindly accepted to do it and they are gratefully acknowledged. The contributions written in English are published as such; those written in French were subsequently translated in English.

The whole conference was recorded on video tapes. For financial and time reasons, it was not possible to transcribe all the exposés for which we didn't receive a written contribution. Somewhat arbitrarily, we restricted ourselves to guest speakers and to the oral exposés, which were not touched in the previous conferences. Transcription was done in the original language of the speaker and was followed by some filtering to eliminate spoken jargon. Translation into English was subsequently made whenever needed. A footnote at the title of each article indicates the nature of the following document: original English, original French, translated, transcription from oral in English, transcription from oral in French and translation in English.

Apologies are due to those whose contribution couldn't be transcribed and reported here. Nevertheless, the author's name, affiliation and title of each contribution is mentioned in due place. However, interested readers can ask the editor to get a copy on a CD-ROM of the slides of all presentations.

The publication of these proceedings has been made possible thanks to a specific financial support of some of our sponsors, namely NATO, the Canon Foundation and CIEHAM. These specific contributions for the English edition are gratefully acknowledged.

Warm thanks are finally due to Ms Marie-Laure Blanchet, editorial assistant of AFAS, who took care of the proceedings layout and of shaping the contributions, as well as the proof reading of some of the texts.