Cruise Tourism and Sustainability Questions in Remote Arctic Regions – Ísafjörður and East Greenland

With the exception of the pandemic period, the arrival of cruise ships to Nordic ports and the nearby Arctic have been constantly growing since the turn of the millennium. This type of seaborn tourism generates income in many localities that would otherwise have little benefit from tourism, but in other areas the growth of tourists from ships has had a crowding out effect on other sometimes more profitable sectors of tourism and is hardly sustainable from the community perspective. In grossly twenty years, different studies on the arrival of cruise ships and their impacts on coastal communities of the North will be revealed with special emphasis on several studies on cruise ship tourism in the circumpolar Arctic but particularly in Iceland and Greenland that span the period 2003–2023. How have perceptions of impact of cruise tourism in peripheral ports of call changed, specifically related to sustainable cruise ship tourism in Iceland and East Greenland? Local sustainability needs to be addressed in policies and actions, but more comparative research is needed to understand various policy options and their effects on remote cruise port communities across the Arctic.