There is still a lot of room to improve regarding the Philippine marine transportation sector.
One major lack is institutionalized education and research to adapt or develop technologies
necessary to determine long term sustainable solutions to the occurrence of incidents and
tragedies at sea. Important fields of research needing priority include the sea state and
operating environment, status of large passenger ferries, improvements on small passenger
crafts and shipbuilding/shiprepair industries. A formal review of state facilities and
organizations on disaster response and preparedness is another research area needing
immediate attention. The paper does not touch on the implementation issues of the different
maritime laws for safety because of inadequate data and expertise in the area. Research on
this component will have to be multi-disciplinary and need the input of social scientists since
a good grasp of human dynamics is required to analyze trends as well as causes of faulty
decision making. Once the data from such research is completed, policies and legislation as
well as executive action can be implemented.
Finally, the use of a comprehensive GIS has proven to be an invaluable tool in integrating
many tasks such as mapping, modeling, query, and analysis of large quantities of data all held
together within a single database. Its use must therefore continue especially now that
MARINA is embarking on the development of maritime incident database for the last 30
years.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT