Oct. 8, 2008 - Stumped on finding the best place to host your next green meeting? Meeting Strategies Worldwide has launched a new website with tools that can help narrow the field.

The Best Places to Meet Green website provides a "green cities" scorecard, ranking certain destinations for their environmental friendliness, and an emissions calculator to help estimate the impact a meeting will have on the environment.

The scorecard ranks cities according to the environmental programs in place at its convention and visitors' bureau, convention center, and hotels in the city's conference package. The scores are verified by Meeting Strategies Worldwide and then entered into a scoring matrix for each of these criteria. Visitors can customize the ranking to sort cities by total score, city name, and city size. Current cities listed are San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Orlando, and Portland, Ore.

The calculator feature allows visitors to evaluate the estimated carbon footprint for potential destinations of a conference. Visitors enter how many attendees they have from each region around the world, and then select destinations where they are interested in holding their event. The calculator provides a report comparing the attendee travel footprint for each of the cities they are considering.

As corporate travel policies become increasingly governed by environmental concerns, more companies are responding. Travel services firm Travelport recently created an online reporting tool that measures the carbon footprint of business trips using the internationally recognized Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

But promoting environmentally friendly destinations for conference planners may not be enough to avert the decline in corporate travel. An increasing number of companies are choosing alternatives to business travel including web conferencing to reduce expenses and emissions.