A Call for Digital Transformation in the Marine Environmental Protection Sector: A case for marine plastic litter pollution monitoring

As one of the top contributors of marine plastic litter in the world’s oceans, the Philippines, having recognized the seriousness of this problem has adopted a National Plan of Action for the Prevention, Reduction, and Management of Marine Litter (NPOA-ML). One of the initial steps of the NPOA-ML is to perform marine litter baselining in identifying the extent of the plastics pollution problem in the environment. Further, recent stakeholder engagements have identified that two of the priority research areas – ‘marine environmental protection,’ and ‘digital transformation’ – in the Philippine maritime sector are aligned with the establishment of baseline data for marine litter. Provided that there are local initiatives in consolidating the available plastics data, this study presents a framework for the digital transformation of plastics data in defining the extent of marine plastics pollution in the country. Briefly, the framework considers the digitization of plastics data from land and sea-based sources, then coupled with the appropriate mechanistic model (i.e., process models) that serves as a backbone for digitalization. Consequently, the direction towards the development of a technological artifact, when using the said framework as a basis, can serve as a holistic risk-assessment tool for the crafting of reduction, control, and mitigation strategies by stakeholders at various levels in the national government.