How Norway Is Determining the Future of Sustainable Cruising
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Marius Beck Dahle/Havila Voyages
We sail into Norway’s fjords after a day spent crossing the North Sea, swapping the boundless blue ocean for winding narrow straits. Our ship, the Queen Anne, is sandwiched on both sides by towering walls of granite, soaring up to 6,500 feet tall and plunging over 4,000 feet beneath the water’s surface. Some sections of the fjord are so tight it feels as though our 3,000-person cruise ship will scrape the cliffside, the waterway just as wide as our wake. The grand scale of it all—the man-made giant versus the natural one—is at once awe-inspiring and unsettling.
In 2023, a record-breaking 6.1 million people visited the Nordic nation via cruise ships, nearly 2 million more than in 2022, Forbes reported—and the Norwegian Coastal Administration estimates the 2024 totals will be even higher. It’s no wonder that so many choose to travel to Norway by cruise: This is a place meant to be experienced from the water. The word fjord itself comes from fjǫrthr in Old Norse, which means “to travel across,” or “a place used for passage and ferrying.” It’s also how we ended up with the English word ferry. Along with the nation’s thousands of islands, these glacier-carved inlets create an accordion-like geography that forms the world’s second longest coastline.
The steady growth in Norway’s cruise visitors is in part linked to ships getting bigger—including Cunard’s newest addition to its fleet and the vessel I sailed on, the 13-deck, 1,058-foot-long Queen Anne. Flipped vertically, it would be the same height as the Chrysler Building. The ship is brand-new, with a long list of technological bells and whistles designed to cut back on waste and pollution (shore power and food waste biodigesters among them). But for the entirety of the voyage, a nagging thought remained in the back of my mind: Could a cruise ship this large ever be truly sustainable?
In 2017 the Norwegian Maritime Authority announced that emissions from cruise ships in Norway’s fjords occasionally exceeded health-damaging air pollution limits in port communities. As a result, the Norwegian parliament passed legislation the following year that required cruise ships to be zero-emissions by 2026 in order to sail in the UNESCO World Heritage fjords, Geirangerfjord and Nærøyfjord.
“The Norwegian Parliament has adopted a brave resolution which will have a great positive impact on conserving our UNESCO World Heritage marine site,” Katrin Blomvik, director of the Geirangerfjord World Heritage Foundation, said at the time in a 2018 statement. “This will make the fjords the world’s first zero-emission zone at sea.”
Then, in August 2024, the Norwegian government delayed the zero-emissions requirement to 2032. The six-year deadline extension applies only to large vessels over 10,000 gross tonnes, as “sufficient technology does not yet exist for the largest ships,” the government said in a translated press release. Smaller tourist ships and ferries would still be required to meet the zero-emissions requirements starting on January 1, 2026.
Cruise companies that had already invested millions in developing emissions-reducing technology were frustrated by this delay, says Elise Caspersen, the head of the maritime sector at ZERO, a Norwegian environmental nonprofit that works toward zero-emission solutions. “They believed in the requirements and the signals from parliament and invested in ships,” she explains.
Lasse Vangstein, the chief sustainability officer at Havila Voyages, a family-owned Norwegian shipping company and cruise line, says the company has already spent about $50 million to ensure their ships would meet the 2026 deadline, investing in everything from batteries charged with onshore hydropower to the FreeCO2ast initiative, a hydrogen fuel pilot program.
The problem with emissions regulations in general is that some of the technology needed to fully transition away from fossil fuels does not yet exist at the needed scale. But since the deadline was set, Norwegian companies have made several new innovations, Caspersen says. For example, the first zero-emission cruise through the Geirangerfjord’s World Heritage fjord was completed in 2022 by Havila Voyages using battery packs (the largest ever installed on a passenger ship) to sail emission-free for up to four hours at a time.
It’s a classic chicken-or-the-egg dilemma, but if anyone can crack the code, it may be this small Nordic nation. What the cruise industry does here over the next five years will set the stage for the rest of Europe, which is currently trying to square the cruise industry’s emissions with the European Union’s goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050. “Norway is always mentioned in international shipping and cruising,” says Vangstein. “I think if we make the right decisions—both from a governmental point of view and also from an industry point of view—I think others will follow. You have to have somebody that shows that this is possible.”
Norway plays an outsized role in the cruise industry: Viking, Norwegian Cruise Line, and Hurtigruten—three of the world’s most well-known cruise lines—were all founded by Norwegians and continue to operate in the fjords today. Called a “superpower on the seas,” the Nordic nation is one of the top maritime nations globally. At the same time, Norway also has one of the world’s smallest carbon footprints, tapping its abundant natural resources—including, of course, the water—to generate renewable energy. The vast majority of the country’s electricity (92% as of 2022) comes from hydropower plants, harnessing renewable power from high-altitude waterfalls, rivers, lakes, and, yes, its fjords.
“No matter where we are in Norway, it’s never too far to go to the sea,” explains Vangstein. “We’ve always been a seafaring country. We’ve always been one of the largest shipping countries in the world. So it’s natural, I think, that we also need to be a part of the [green] transition and the development of technology [for cruise ships].”
By using battery power and liquified natural gas (LNG), Havila has decreased its CO2 emissions by 35% and reduced air pollutants like NOx and SOx by 90%, per the 2023 sustainability report. Hurtigruten, another Norwegian cruise company, has invested over $100 million into environmental upgrades for its fleet in recent years, including equipping three ships to use hybrid electric power, which the company says will cut their CO2 emissions by 25% and NOx emissions by 80% by 2025.
Through a government contract called a “request for tender,” Havila and Hurtigruten both operate tourism sailings on Norway’s coastal express route, which connects 34 ports stretching from Bergen in the south to Kirkenes in the far northeast, near the Russian border. The route isn’t just a tourist attraction: For 130-plus years, it has served as vital shipping and transportation infrastructure for Norway’s port communities, especially those in the rural north that lack air and rail links.
The historic route is the “ideal case” for developing the first zero-emissions cruise ship for a few reasons, explains Trond Johnsen, the center director of SINTEF, a nonprofit research organization that has partnered with Hurtigruten on their Sea Zero sustainability initiative.
“This is a route where it’s actually possible to go electric because the distances between each port are not that long,” he says. “You’re not trying to cross the Atlantic or even cross the North Sea down to Europe, which would require very big batteries—bigger than the ship itself.” With more frequent charging opportunities, smaller batteries can be installed, and thanks to Norway’s hydropower capabilities, electric battery production and charging is also completed using renewable energy. By combining battery power with additional technology, like solar panels and retractable sails to harness wind power, Hurtigruten says it is on track to launch a zero-emissions cruise ship by 2030.
While the World Heritage fjords requirements now won’t go into effect until 2032, SINTEF and Hurtigruten are hoping that the Norwegian government will add a zero-emissions stipulation to the coastal express contract. The contract will expire and reopen for bidding in 2030, according to Johnsen, redetermining which companies get to operate on the route and how many ships (out of the current cap of 11) each line gets. “I think we all want that,” he says. “This project [Sea Zero] actually showed that it’s possible.”
Norway may soon see the first zero-emissions cruise ship, but transitioning the technologies to scale around the world will not be without its challenges—especially for larger cruise ships traveling further distances, which require much more power (and funding). However, the international research that Havila and Hurtigruten are putting to the test today, like FreeCO2ast and Sea Zero, are proof that solutions are out there.
“Today, everything is scalable—it’s just a matter of willingness and motivation,” says Vangstein. “It is a bigger challenge, but it’s not impossible.”
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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