Small town Iceland isn’t what it used to be. During the peak summer season, some of Iceland’s coastal communities are bustling with cruise ship tourists, overwhelming local residents many times over. For some, these tourists represent an injection of cosmopolitan vitality into otherwise small, sleepy towns. For others, they represent the noise, pollution, and crowds of the big city, everything an Icelandic fishing town isn’t.
Bigger and bigger
When the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Symphony of the Sea launched in 2018, it was the largest cruise ship in the world. Longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall, it was also approximately five times the total tonnage of the RMS Titanic. When it arrived in Barcelona to begin its maiden voyage, however, it was met with protests by locals. Barcelona has some of the worst air quality in all of Europe, thanks in large part to its port. The arrival of the cruise ship was not just potentially damaging locals’ health, they argued; it also brought very little economic benefit, with the average tourist spending about €57 in the city and then spending the night aboard the ship.
Since 2018, cruise ships have only gotten bigger. As tourism continues to break records both in Iceland and internationally following the COVID slump, policymakers, scientists, and travellers have all been made increasingly aware of its environmental impact. Much of the discourse has recently revolved around air travel, which contributes approximately 2.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the cruise ship industry is significantly more harmful to the environment on a per-passenger basis than flight. A 2019 study by NGO Transport & Environment found that ships operated by just one cruise line, Carnival, emitted ten times as much sulphur oxide (SOX) as Europe’s entire passenger vehicle fleet that year. While this is just one greenhouse gas, the numbers paint a troubling picture. And while an airline traveller can fly to their destination and disembark to their hotel, short-term rental, or luxury spa, cruise ships drag their luxury destinations around the world with them, burning some of the most-polluting types of fuel while doing so. It is generally not the largest cruise ships that frequent Iceland’s ports, but even comparatively “small” ones may feature casinos, movie theatres, swimming pools, spas, arcades, and upwards of 2,000 passengers aboard.
Power play
Running the infrastructure of a small town takes power, and most cruise ships to date have used “bunker oil,” a cheap but highly pollutive fuel source. Diesel fuel is a viable and comparatively clean alternative but is significantly more expensive than bunker oil. Furthermore, it is not just at sea that cruise ships have to burn fuel. In order to keep the lights on, cruise ships still have to operate generators while in port. In larger harbours, power connections are available that allow the ships to use shore power, but many of the small coastal communities in Iceland where cruise ships dock lack this level of infrastructure, meaning that the ships must rely on their own, more pollutive, fuel while in harbour as well.
In the 2020 documentary Shore Power by Canadian filmmaker Jessica Auer, Seyðisfjörður harbour master Rúnar Gunnarsson stated: “Obviously, if a ship is docked for, say, 24 hours, it’s a lot of fuel that gets burned while they’re docked. If it was viable to use shore power, we would jump at it, but there’s a high cost to implementing this, and the distribution system we have wouldn’t be able to cope. If you think about the moderate-sized ships, not even the biggest ones, they need as much power as all of Seyðisfjörður.”
To date, there have not been comprehensive studies done on the effect of cruise ships on local air quality. Some samples have been taken in Seyðisfjörður, where residents have expressed concerns that pollution can become trapped in the narrow fjord for significantly longer than in more open harbours.
The newest generation of cruise ships have begun incorporating green technologies, including the use of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) as a fuel source. While the use of LNG reduces nitrogen oxide and particulate emissions by about 80%, LNG also contains methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As of 2019, some 60% of cruise ships were additionally equipped with scrubbers, a type of catalytic converter used in ships to convert toxic exhaust into less harmful emissions. However, investigative reporting by the Independent showed that many of these scrubbers were “open loop,” instead of “closed loop.” Ideally, a closed loop system would contain the toxic waste for safe disposal later, but open loop systems instead converted the extracted waste into liquid form, allowing it to be pumped into the ocean while still conforming to emission regulations.
In response to the environmental concerns that surround this industry, the Ísafjörður Port Authority in the Westfjords recently announced that it will be implementing the Environmental Port Index next year. The Environmental Port Index (EPI) is based on a Norwegian model with the goal of reducing pollution while in harbour. The EPI is based on calculations for environmental impact that take into account several greenhouse gases, including CO2, SO2, and NOX. According to Ísafjörður Harbour Master Hilmar Kristjánsson Lyngmo, “we want to measure emissions and other pollution from the ships. It accumulates over the harbour and all of the town as well. It’s also good to be in line with the other harbours in Iceland, that there’s the same rating system in the harbours.” While the system is already in place in several other Icelandic ports, some observers have asked why such regulation and monitoring is decided at a local level, and not a national one.
Balancing act
According to the municipality of Ísafjörður, cruise ships have become an integral part of the local economy, with income from docking fees representing half of the Ísafjörður Port Authority’s total revenue. Without this income, the port would operate at a loss, needing municipal subsidies to stay in operation. According to a survey conducted among cruise ship passengers in Ísafjörður in the summer of 2018, their average spending on land was ISK 16,500 [$122, €114], including expenses such as food, souvenirs, and tours in the region. Indeed, around two-thirds of passenger spending was on tours, and business with cruise ship passengers has increasingly become the backbone of the tourism industry in Iceland’s remote Westfjords. Although better equipped with infrastructure, Reykjavík is not immune to the constant streams either. On September 7, relatively late in the cruise season, a total of five cruise ships sat in Reykjavík harbour, bringing with them a total of 10,000 passengers.
In addition to the direct economic benefits brought by cruise ships to Icelandic shores, one potentially positive side effect of the industry is in changing patterns of travel to Iceland’s busiest tourist destinations. As Icelandic tourism reaches ever-higher numbers, there is increasing concern for the conservation of Iceland’s busiest sites, such as Gullfoss, Geysir, and Reynisfjara. One solution is to spread the load, and according to the Icelandic Tourist Board, in unlocking otherwise inaccessible regions of Iceland such as the Westfjords and Eastfjords, cruise ship tourism may play an indirect role in conserving the busiest sites in Iceland.
In order to accommodate the still-burgeoning industry, the high season of tourism in Iceland has also been constantly extending. As Gunnar Tryggvason, Faxaflói bay harbour master recently stated to Vísir: “getting traffic into the shoulder seasons helps us distribute the load. So we see more and more ships in April and September, though this has begun causing some safety concerns due to weather and winds, especially as we stretch further into September.”
Though there are doubtless ways in which tourism has enriched Iceland culturally and financially, it seems clear that it is not an industry that can grow indefinitely. And while it is Iceland’s smallest ports and communities that stand to benefit the most from the revenue streams brought by cruise ships, small communities are also especially vulnerable to their ever-increasing numbers. As former mayor of Seyðisfjörður, Aðalheiður Borgþórsdóttir, stated in Shore Power: “Now we have a real industry, we have more guides, more buses, more tours. I think people are getting something out of [the cruise ships]. But then there are the big ships that really nobody likes to have in port. We can’t accommodate them, and we’re at the point where we need to make a strategy for this industry.”
