Advancing Sustainable Tourism in Svalbard by Assessing and Prioritizing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Tourism is a significant sector on the Svalbard archipelago. The increase in visitors and tourism activities has reshaped the local community of Longyearbyen, brought new economic opportunities, and put greater pressure on the local environment. Tourism operators address ways to integrate the concept of sustainability in their products, management, and communications, as well as focus on selected sustainable development goals (SDGs). Yet, many actors struggle to prioritize work with the SDGs. Through a case study of the tourism sector on Svalbard, this article offers a novel methodology to identify, assess, and hierarchize the most relevant SDGs at the target level. Based on qualitative data, we reviewed all 169 targets and identified 42 relevant targets for tourism in Svalbard. We filled a table to assess these targets and hierarchize them, taking into consideration the context in Svalbard and information we gathered from document analyses and interviews with local stakeholders. Our findings show that tourism operators on Svalbard play a decisive role in contributing to the three pillars of sustainability (economic, social, and environmental). However, better inclusion of targets with a strong social dimension in sustainability strategies will contribute to a successful operationalization of the SDG framework. We emphasize the importance of coordinating work between the tourism industry and local and national authorities to achieve the most complex SDG targets. Moreover, we encourage the tourism operators to identify relevant but underrepresented sustainability areas in their strategies to develop their own feasible contributions, while integrating the whole SDG framework into their development models.