Wilderness protection in Iceland

Introduction With a population of 330,000, a land area of 103,000 km² (~3 habitants per km²), and with its inhabited regions (which constitute a mere twenty-five per cent of the total territory) primarily confined to coastal areas and lowlands below 200 m above sea level, Iceland is usually pictured as a place within which one can not only enjoy unspoiled nature but also experience the uniqueness of the Icelandic highlands, including their wilderness. More than half of Icelandic territory lies higher than 400 m above sea level, which predominantly comprises an uninhabited interior highland plateau (400-700 m above sea level), and about sixteen per cent of the land is covered by glaciers, lava flows, lakes and rivers. Around 17,000 km² of the land mass has already been formally protected (~ seventeen per cent of Iceland). From the outset these characteristics should endow Icelandic wilderness with a degree of natural protection. However, a recent wilderness study reflects a troubling trend. In the period from 1936 to 2010, the development of road and power infrastructure (including dams and reservoirs), located in or dependant on the natural resources of the highlands, has led to a reduction of nearly seventy per cent of wilderness areas. Furthermore, tourism has grown considerably and, as Taylor points out, tourism and wilderness ‘have both a beneficial and conflicting relationship’. However, the fragile ecosystem of remote wilderness, such as that of Iceland, necessitates carefully managed tourism to prevent the destruction of the resource. As will be further elaborated in this chapter, the term ‘virgin wilderness’ was specifically defined as a legal concept in Act No 44/1999 on Nature Conservation (NC-1999) that entered into force on 1 July 1999. This act has recently been replaced by the Act No 60/2013 on Nature Conservation (NC-2013), that came into force on 15 November 2015. In this new act, the term ‘virgin wilderness’ has been replaced by the term ‘uninhabited wilderness’. Furthermore, also two other Acts currently in force, Act No 106/2000 on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA-2000) and Act No 123/2010 on Spatial Planning (SP-2010), make direct reference to the concept of wilderness, as will be further outlined in Section 4. The operational function of the wilderness concept in NC-1999 has seemingly been rather limited and legal research in this field is accordingly scarce.