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AUSTIN, Texas – The COVID-19 pandemic has brought work trips and face-to-face meetings to a standstill, but new research has shown that this shift has made it easier for more people who were previously unable to attend these events to attend and reduced their environmental footprint.
A research team led by engineers from the University of Texas at Austin analyzed several scientific conferences that were held virtually for the first time in the first few months of the pandemic. In a new paper, published today in Nature Sustainability, the researchers examined the ecological, social and economic costs of virtual conferences compared to face-to-face events and analyzed how the online relocation of the participation of women, young scientists from underrepresented institutions changed and countries.
The study found that virtual events cut costs and reduced time and travel expenses that previously held some conferences from attracting diverse groups of participants. It also eliminates the environmental cost of hundreds or thousands of people flying to a conference from around the world.
“When we went virtual, a lot more voices came to the table who simply couldn’t be there for personal events for cost, time and other reasons,” said Kasey Faust, assistant professor at the Cockrell School of the Faculty of Building, Architecture – and environmental engineering of engineering.
The cost of attending several recent conferences in person for African scientists has averaged between 80% and 250% of annual gross domestic product per person in their country, compared to about 3% of gross domestic product per capita for US attendees.
In addition to the costs, face-to-face events also require an enormous investment of time. These events require travel, often last several days, and take up all of the attendees’ time while they are there.
This can be a major challenge, especially for women. For many younger workers, this phase of life coincides with the time when many children are having children. The way to conferences is therefore a challenge for women, said Faust, who also has two young children.
According to the study, women’s participation in virtual conferences increased by up to 253% compared to previous face-to-face conferences. And in academia, student and postdoctoral attendance increased by up to 344%.
The extent of the climate impact is also appalling. The researchers estimate that only a single participant in a face-to-face conference in 2019 had the same ecological footprint as 7,000 virtual conference participants on average of the conferences analyzed.
The researchers said virtual events open up opportunities for greater international participation that is limited by costs and travel documents. For example, one woman in the study who is a mother of young children said she does not have the necessary travel documents to travel outside of her country, which prevents her from attending conferences around the world.
“She has been able to network more than ever in the past year, and that would never have happened with a face-to-face conference,” said Manish Kumar, associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering.
The team includes researchers from UT Austin, the University of Ottawa, Arizona State University, Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Southern California. The study was originally started to evaluate the unexpectedly successful annual meeting of the North American Membrane Society (NAMS) in May 2020, one of the first virtual engineering conferences. The authors expanded the study to compare face-to-face attendance with virtual attendance at the NAMS meeting and several other technical conferences.
The study found that virtual conferencing has many advantages, but challenges remain. This includes a lack of commitment and a lack of personal networking. About 75% of attendees at one academic conference and 96% at another said they prefer face-to-face networking and that virtual meetings feel spurious and artificial.
In-person conferences are slowly returning, but researchers expect many events to create hybrid offerings, possibly at lower prices.
“Tech companies are already doing this with their events,” said Kumar. “Smart people will at least partially hybridize their events.”
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https://news.utexas.edu/2021/12/09/virtual-conferences-are-better-for-the-environment-and-more-inclusive/
