Visiting this blog you probably noticed a significant number of conferences, workshops where many people attend via air travel. Our stand (quite unpopular among many advocates) is to question the real use of many of those meetings and their cost-effectiveness as such travel and hospitality expenses tend go get high quickly (also add the "per diems").
Maybe that explains why the corresponding budgets are kept like state secrets. We'll see how the ongoing (?) independent evaluation of the IDRC program will fare. Although we don't know yet who the independent experts are, we'll keep you posted and for now refer you to this article about compensating for the carbon footprint of extensive air travel. Of course preventing the damage is much better and with skype and all the modern internet tools reducing drastically the number of meetings requiring air travel should be quite easy and effective. Will WHO, ACS and the Consortium fare better in that domain? I think requiring that each trip be recorded publicly with the cost and a short explanation would be an interesting way to make everybody think twice before engaging into extensive travel (and hospitality).
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