Sustainability for whom?

About

Courtesy of the pandemic, online conferences took over massively. The success of many of these events has made many members of our community think that organizing conferences online or in multiple regional hubs in parallel, could be our contribution to the carbon footprint of conference travel. Being this probably positive, it would also have a negative side. It will contribute to further enhance the already unbalanced research distribution between "South" and "North".

We all know that physics suffers a severe representation problem, other fields as well. It is not a secret that the work of researchers from the North is published significantly more often and on more prominent platforms than the work of researchers from the South. Major international conferences and workshop have been for years the chance that scientist from the South have to take part in forums where the state-of-the-art science is discussed, where connections are established and where networking takes place. Moving to a system of online conferences will have a negative impact on the dire need of more cultural/geographic diversity that Physics has. It is true that hypermobility of scholars in the North must now be reconsidered, but not at the price of isolating the rest of the word and intensifying global inequalities. As scientists born and educated in the South, but with a scientific career developed in the North, we would like to open a discussion about this and present our personal perspective of what measures can be taken to ensure sustainability in our field but at the same time make sure that our community does not left scientist from the South behind.