ACCORDING to Bard AI (Artificial Intelligence), the extended continental shelf (ECS) refers to the portion of the continental shelf that extends beyond the 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of a coastal state.
In other words, it is the underwater landmass that continues past a country’s existing maritime borders.
The legal basis for defining and acknowledging both the EEZ and the ECS is derived from the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Because of that, there should be no problem in asserting our own ECS claims, not unless some errant states would also file counter-claims that would certainly be baseless.
Russia, Australia and Brazil have some of the biggest ECS claims, with 7.0 million, 5.6 million and 4.5 million square kilometers, respectively.
The United States of America (USA) has already established its ECS claim at 1.0 million square kilometers.
There is a possibility, however, that the USA claim could go as high as 5.1 million square kilometers, thus making their new territory slightly bigger than Alaska.
The USA claim is being handled by the US Department of State, the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That gives us an idea that our taskforce for our own ECS claim should be led by our Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), the National Mapping and Resource Information Agency (NAMRIA) and the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
ACQUIRING AND MANAGING EARTHQUAKE DATA
To buy or to build. That is the classic question in technology management.
Before asking that question however, the data host entity which could either be a government agency or a private company, has to ask themselves how much money is already available or could potentially be made available, based on an objective needs analysis.
In the case of acquiring and managing earthquake data, however, it would be fair to assume that since we are talking about saving lives and property, whatever money is already available will probably be not enough, and there would always be a need to make more money available.
There is surely no question whether it is needed or not. To buy or to build involves either buying data that is already commercially available, or to build the infrastructure that could collect data from raw sources, for purposes of data consolidation and analytics, two back-to-back processes that would ultimately result in possessing data that could have been commercially bought.
In the overall, I think it would be more practical to acquire data that is already available from both commercial and official sources, instead of building the infrastructure ourselves.
The official sources could be tapped using diplomatic channels, under the aegis of economic diplomacy. We could start with techno-economic cooperation within the ASEAN, since we have common interests with all its members./PN
