How Norway Is Determining the Future of Sustainable Cruising

19.12.2024 - 16:33 / cntraveler.com / Anne Queenanne

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.

Havila Voyages sailed the first zero-emission cruise through the Geirangerfjord World Heritage fjord in 2022.

“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