The tourism culture of visiting cabins has been deeply rooted in the Norwegian culture and it is still a progressing tourism industry in terms of cultural aspects, social aspects and economic aspects. Eventually, the cabin projects and cabin owners started to think about the nature and environment for a sustainable cabin development, which makes the identity of Norwegian cultural relics long live.
"We must build fewer cabins and holiday homes, reduce the amount of nature we build on and get more out of the remaining square meters", Stein Lier Hansen, CEO of Norsk Industri (Finstad and Fjeld 2019).
Old cabins are less visited by the owners because they have limited facilities, which is not as convenient in the modern society. A change in the standards of building and using cabins is really needed to care about the surrounding environment and to reduce carbon footprints. The cabin project at Nerskogen is carefully figuring out how to create the balance between the basic requirements for modern society and sustainability of nature.
The overall design is thought to have a minor environmental impact; in the form of a cabin cluster, which is composed of common and public facilities.
From the blueprint of Nerskogen cabin project, the environmentally friendly ideas are as follows:
Each part of the cabins is built with natural materials, such as wood-based materials for the support infrastructure. There are also other eco-friendly solutions such as hot-tubs using solar collectors, green roofs and solar cells, collection of rainwater for cultivation and toilet, energy-saving transportation such as carsharing, electric cars or bicycles, or walking distance to public transportation, and ski and bike facilities including technical room for common use. The selection of building materials is based on the local and maintenance-free criteria.
The nature-based local building materials and interior will reduce the transportation charges, unwanted pollution to the local environment and minimize the carbon footprints comparing to the other unsustainable construction projects in the same area.
Nerskogen cabin project is the beginning of a way of thinking as a public partnership and with respect to the nature. The project intends to construct the cabins simply in accordance with the prior studied terrain and type of landscape in the area, to upgrade the small-scale green economy by using cultivation technique in the greenhouse, to facilitate green packaging and environmentally friendly composting and waste sorting, and lastly, to facilitate getting in touch with nature for the children by creating forest playground.
The location of the project is surrounded by a marsh, which will be directly impacted by human development both from the building process and when cabin owners are in place. This can affect the wetland functions of water retention and its habitat provisioning (Ficken et al. 2019). Lund (personal communication, 2019) states that the area planned for the construction is "open firm ground". However it is surrounded by marsh land, and they will avoid touching the marsh as much as possible.
Even a good start of thinking about the sustainable way of building cabins may have some impact on the existing environment, as a result of the land use and logistic expansion of infrastructure in the pristine nature. The cabin cluster project is at its preliminary stage of development, which is the most suitable time to start the consideration of increase in traffic in the project area and the upcoming increase of outdoor recreational activities.
This building project ideally wants the cabins to be used at a higher frequency than traditional cabins. How they would like to do this is not yet decided, and therefore we will use a rental strategy here to exemplify. If the cabins are rented out as often as possible when they are not used by the owners, we can assume that it results in more traffic created by visitors to get to the cabins. The additional air pollution and noise pollution due to this, can result in undesirable environmental consequences. This is a possible effect that should be assessed as part of the planning process. When assessing the increase in traffic, the planners could evaluate whether they could offer alternative ways to get to the cabins to be as environmentally friendly as possible.
The cabin tourism also relates to outdoor recreational activities like skiing and hiking in nature. Whatever the ideal concept of a cabin trip is, even just exposure to the wild nature, recreational activities may have an impact on the nature. The pollution in the area will probably increase as the use of land and natural habitat increases. For example could more use of the mountain tracks lead to more waste left in the nature along the tracks.
References: