Professor and author Thomas Homer-Dixon. (photo supplied)

The Upside of Down author warns looming fossil fuels crisis will drastically alter movement of people

The meetings and convention industry is in for some radical changes, if predictions put forward by Thomas Homer-Dixon prove true.

The University of Toronto professor and author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization was in Ottawa last week, invited by Meeting Professionals International (MPI) as a keynote speaker for National Meetings Industry Day.

Mr. Homer-Dixon, speaking with the OBJ the day before his address, reiterated that the world was in store for some major changes as a result of climate change and the end of cheap energy, two of the five "tectonic stresses" he brought up in his 2007 book.

Two major factors will cause world oil prices to increase, likely quite sharply. Mr. Homer-Dixon said world supply was running out, and used several clues, such as Saudi Arabia's refusal to increase its supply despite repeated requests for it to do so. The world's cheapest and most plentiful reserves, he suggests, have already peaked.

The second factor is a carbon tax or a world cap-and-trade system, which he said is likely, especially with a regime change in store in the United States.

As a result of high oil and gas prices, the travel industry will be hit hard.

"(Travel) will be affected by two independent trends, both of which could push prices up quite sharply," he said.

"It could be incremental, or it could be sudden and sharp."

Travel for the sake of travel will end, as will frivolous or unnecessary travel to conferences, where the value for companies in attending isn't worth the money it will cost to get there.

"Travel is very carbon-intensive," he said. Instead of attending every single regional or sector-specific event, firms will likely pick and choose to attend just the biggest sector event of the year.

Alternatively, others will only attend regional events, conferences that are closer and therefore cheaper. Or, suggested Mr. Homer-Dixon, a hybrid arrangement will come about, where a number of regional conferences occur simultaneously, but are all linked to one another virtually so some delegates can video conference on the Internet rather than attend in person. At some point in the future, delegates will simply don "a helmet in a room" and attend a conference virtually as their favourite avatar.

"Eventually, we will have that," he said, but right now, "there's bandwidth bottlenecks happening all over the place. We're all very bandwidth-hungry. Virtually all the 'infinite' bandwidth we thought we had laid down in the 1990s is disappearing very rapidly."

With the world changing so quickly, Mr. Homer-Dixon wondered aloud whether Ottawa's plans for a new Congress Centre took the future of travel into account.

"The short answer? Yes, we have been taking that into consideration," Andrew Beattie, director of sales for the Congress Centre, told the OBJ.

The new Congress Centre, slated for completion in April 2011, is already taking reservations. Mr. Beattie said that planners took into account the expectation that corporate Canada will have a lower appetite for travel when the new facility was designed, and said Ottawa still has points in its favour.

First, he said, there's a pent-up demand in Ottawa for conference space. "So that's a good thing," he said.

Second, global travel is expected to double to 160 million travellers annually by 2020 from the current 80 million, he said, the result of emerging economies and global growth.

"Even if meeting planners were to scale back the number of meetings they have, the industry as a whole, globally, is growing at such a rate the demand for this facility will just continue to be there."

Mr. Beattie added that the new centre will be equipped with the latest technological advances and broadband technology to handle international video conferencing.

"We do foresee it ... where we could have a worldwide conference, where Ottawa could be the North American hub, while simultaneous conferences are going on in London, Johannesburg, and Buenos Aires."

Different measuring stick

But Mr. Homer-Dixon emphasized that the meeting and convention industry must seriously rethink how it measures success.

"Its metric is inappropriate," he said. "(It) tends to measure its success by the number of delegates in hotel rooms booked, in travel miles, in meals served; it's all about procurement.

"The metrics should be the quality of the information (and) the extent to which it strengthened the professional association," he said. "People go to share information ... it's nice when it's face-to-face. (But) sometimes we seem to assume that the active meeting is valuable in itself. We think that there's substance. The substance is in the networks, in the information gained. That's where we need to focus our attention."

UNDER PRESSURE

The five "tectonic stresses" that threaten a global catastrophe, according to Prof. Thomas Homer-Dixon's The Upside of Down:

economic stress resulting from instabilities in the global economic system and ever-widening income gaps between rich and poor people

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