Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the parties to support and further develop international and intergovernmental programmes
and networks or organizations involved in research, data collection, and systematic obser-
vation, including promoting access to, and the exchange of, data and analyses obtained
from areas beyond national jurisdiction.
The development of tsunami early warning and mitigation systems can be seen from
the perspective of the emergence of new regional regimes dealing with marine scientific
research, especially with regard to the institutional arrangements put in place for such sys-
tems, which include governance mechanisms, operational standards and requirements, and
separate agreements for the provision of tsunami watch services. These arrangements are
based on commitment to principles in the policies of competent international organizations
to establish general criteria and guidelines to assist states in ascertaining the nature and im-
plicationsofmarinescientific research(theIntergovernmentalOceanographicCommission
(IOC), in the case of tsunami warning systems), rather than on compliance with binding
agreements for their development and implementation, nor on modalities for their enforce-
ment. An analysis of the evolution in the dynamics of the intergovernmental regional co-
ordination groups established for tsunami early warning shows the adaptive nature of these
governance mechanisms which reflects change in key concepts and principles, change in
the group of leading actors, and expansion in the functional scope of the early warning sys-
tems.
The international Argo Project (the set-up and systematic running of networks of fa-
cilities for the continuous monitoring of ocean parameters such as temperature, salinity,
and velocity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean) stresses the need for participating countries
to agree on some form of international legal regulation related to the employment of thou-
sands of voluntary observing ships and ships of opportunity, tide gauges, surface drifters,
subsurface drifters, moored buoys, and profiling floats that may drift into national exclus-
ive economic zones (EEZs). The Argo Project provides a clear example of a very success-
ful programme aimed at collecting, organizing, and making available data on a free, unres-
tricted, and real-time basis which - as in the case of the data generated through the tsunami
early warning system - are critical to the protection of life and property (information and
