Forty Years Of The Coordinating Committee For Geoscience - CCOP

Figure 2. The Japanese Delegation at the first Session of CCOP in Quezon City, The
Philippines, 27 May to 2 June, 1966.
In all, over forty people took part during the seven days of the meeting (see Appendix 3 for list
of main participants). The organisation of the ensuing discussions must have been extremely
rigorous as a surprising amount of progress was made. At the outset, draft terms of reference for
the Committee, as originally proposed at the Tokyo meeting of November 1965 (see Appendix 1)
were formally adopted. Furthermore it was agreed that, as stated in the Terms of Reference, the
Committee should have a Technical Secretariat and that the Mineral Resources Development
Section of ECAFE could form the temporary core of such a body. The Japanese Government was
quick to offer funding for the services of an experienced geophysicist to be attached to the
Technical Secretariat for one or two years under the auspices of ECAFE. In view of this
generous offer, the Committee suggested that a technical representative of each of the countries
of the Committee be attached to the Secretariat under the same conditions as Japan had proposed.
This, it was hoped, would be achieved “as soon as each (country) was in a position to do so” but
in fact this was never completely achieved in the way that the Committee envisaged at this first
session.
The Committee also decided that a Technical Advisory Group (TAG) should be formed to
review a programme to be drafted by the Technical Secretariat and to advise on technical
matters. Considerable thought and discussion quickly refined this proposal such that one of the
future cornerstones of the Committee (CCOP) 2 , and its mode of operation, was quickly defined.
In view of the reported offers of assistance from several ‘advanced’ countries, it was suggested
that experts from those countries should be invited to join the TAG as ‘Special Advisers’ and
ECAFE was requested to explore the possibility of the contribution by the Governments of the
relevant countries of the services of Prof. J. McG. Bruckshaw (UK), Prof Dr H Closs (Germany),
Dr K O Emery (USA), Dr M Hayakawa (Japan) and Dr Obermuller (France), all eminent marine
geologists or geophysicists. This was an impressive line-up of international expertise and though
it was originally envisaged that the Special Advisers would normally serve on the TAG for only
one year, in fact they all helped to steer the Committee successfully through most of its early
2 The acronym CCOP first appeared in the report of the 1968 Session of the Committee and has
been retained ever since. In this account the terms “The Committee” and CCOP are synonymous.
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A World of Difference