As the Arctic warms and snow and sea ice melts, hitherto inaccessible parts of the Arctic Ocean are opening up, with important implications for the shipping sector generally and the cruise ship industry specifically. Thus far, international regulation has failed to keep pace with the environmental impacts of increasing cruise ship activity, in particular black carbon (BC) emissions and underwater radiated noise (URN). The absence of binding international regulation on BC and URN reflects a widening regulatory gap at precisely the moment when legal intervention is most needed to mitigate escalating and potentially irreversible environmental impacts.
Ebbersmeyer et al. (2026) studied this question.