Suchergebnisse

For decades, rapid, drastic changes in reindeer rangelands, also referred to as 'pastures' in Finland, have threatened the ability of the Sami to practice traditional reindeer herding and make their own decisions regarding reindeer husbandry. Depending on national reindeer herding legislation, this will have different effects in different parts of Sapmi, the traditional Sami areas in the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland and northwest Russia. This chapter will present a case study on declining pasture conditions and 'overgrazing' in the Finnish North. It will examine the potential of traditional pasture management and rotational grazing systems based on Indigenous knowledge (IK) to secure reindeer herding as a subsistence base for the production of healthy, culturally appropriate food through traditional food systems. This issue will be approached from a food sovereignty perspective by relating the Finnish Sami reindeer herders' situation in relation to the six pillars of food sovereignty. This chapter will also discuss Finnish reindeer herders' situation from a (human) rights-based approach. In brief, this analysis shows that a change towards more traditional rangeland management, supported by appropriate participatory modes of research that combine different ways of knowing about traditional grazing lands, collaborative decision-making processes, and adequate reindeer herding legislation, could be an important step towards increased food sovereignty in the Finnish parts of Sapmi.

In this paper we explore howWestern scientific concepts and attitudes towards indigenous knowledge, as they pertain to resource management and climate change, differ from the prevailing view in modern Russia. Western indigenous leaders representing the Inuit and Saami peoples are actively engaged in the academic and political discourse surrounding climate change, whereas their Russian colleagues tend to focus more on legislation and self-determination, as a post-Soviet legacy. We contribute to the debate with data from the Nenets tundra, showing how different research has employed the three crucial Western research paradigms of climate change, wildlife management and indigenous knowledge on the ground. We suggest that the daily practice of tundra nomadism involves permanent processes of negotiating one's position in a changing environment, which is why "adaptation" is woven into the society, and cosmology as a whole, rather than being separable into distinct "bodies" of knowledge or Western-designed categories. We argue that research agendas should be placed in their proper local and regional context, and temporal framework: for example, by collaborating with herders on the topics of weather instead of climate change, herding skills instead of wildlife management, and ways of engaging with the tundra instead of traditional ecological knowledge.

This chapter addresses the challenges to reindeer husbandry in Fennoscandia from a systems perspective. Drawing on information in other chapters in this book, the specific focus is on so called tipping points, or abrupt changes in the coupled social-ecological system. Tipping points may occur when external drivers push a system to an alternative system state, characterized by different feedbacks than in the original state. Compared to 'ideal' or traditional reindeer husbandry, examples of alternative states include reliance on supplementary feeding to compensate for losses of pastures, fencing herds to provide protection from predation, becoming a meat-processing industry based on more centralized herding practices and a total loss of reindeer husbandry. All of these states are seen as undesirable by the herders. Reindeer husbandry, as it is currently practised, requires intact social-ecological relationships within the herding districts, as well as in their interaction with the external society. These system qualities need to be strengthened as they innately provide resilience, and will demand structural, institutional and legislative changes, but also discursive changes of how we imagine what sustainability is, and whether herders are treated as one of many stakeholders or as the rights holders that they really are according to the law.

Background: Reindeer and caribou (both belonging to the species Rangifer tarandus L.) are among the most important large herbivores in Eurasia's and North America's arctic, alpine and boreal zones. In Sweden, the impact of reindeer grazing on arctic and alpine vegetation has recently been re-evaluated. In the 1990s, records of grazing-related vegetation degradation helped to form a widespread perception that some mountain areas were overgrazed. However, later analyses have shown no evidence of large-scale overutilisation of reindeer ranges in the Swedish mountains. The present-day consensus is that overgrazing has been temporary and local, and that it rarely has caused permanent damage, but it is imperative to examine the scientific support for these views. Moreover, the Swedish Parliament has adopted an environmental quality objective according to which it is essential to preserve 'a mountain landscape characterised by grazing'. No details have been given on how this goal is to be interpreted, which is another reason why the significance of reindeer grazing for arctic/alpine vegetation needs to be assessed. This protocol presents the methodology that will be used in a systematic review of the impact of reindeer herbivory in arctic and alpine ecosystems. The focus will be on Fennoscandia, but data from other parts of the range of R. tarandus will be used when deemed appropriate. Methods: The review will be based on primary field studies that compare vegetation subject to different degrees of reindeer/caribou herbivory (including grazing and browsing as well as trampling). Such comparisons can be either temporal, spatial or both. The review will cover impacts of herbivory in arctic, subarctic, alpine and subalpine areas (including the forest-tundra ecotone) across the range of R. tarandus, but not in boreal forests. Relevant aspects of vegetation include cover (abundance), biomass, diversity (e.g. species richness), structure, composition (including functional groups) and productivity.

Abstract Background: Reindeer and caribou (both belonging to the species Rangifer tarandus L.) are among the most important large herbivores in Eurasia's and North America's arctic, alpine and boreal zones. In Sweden, the impact of reindeer grazing on arctic and alpine vegetation has recently been re-evaluated. In the 1990s, records of grazing-related vegetation degradation helped to form a widespread perception that some mountain areas were overgrazed. However, later analyses have shown no evidence of large-scale overutilisation of reindeer ranges in the Swedish mountains. The present-day consensus is that overgrazing has been temporary and local, and that it rarely has caused permanent damage, but it is imperative to examine the scientific support for these views. Moreover, the Swedish Parliament has adopted an environmental quality objective according to which it is essential to preserve 'a mountain landscape characterised by grazing'. No details have been given on how this goal is to be interpreted, which is another reason why the significance of reindeer grazing for arctic/alpine vegetation needs to be assessed. This protocol presents the methodology that will be used in a systematic review of the impact of reindeer herbivory in arctic and alpine ecosystems. The focus will be on Fennoscandia, but data from other parts of the range of R. tarandus will be used when deemed appropriate. Methods: The review will be based on primary field studies that compare vegetation subject to different degrees of reindeer/caribou herbivory (including grazing and browsing as well as trampling). Such comparisons can be either temporal, spatial or both. The review will cover impacts of herbivory in arctic, subarctic, alpine and subalpine areas (including the forest-tundra ecotone) across the range of R. tarandus, but not in boreal forests. Relevant aspects of vegetation include cover (abundance), biomass, diversity (e.g. species richness), structure, composition (including functional groups) and productivity. Keywords: Reindeer, Caribou, Rangifer tarandus, Herbivory, Grazing, Browsing, Vegetation, Alpine, Arctic, Tundra

In Sápmi and beyond, the practice of reindeer herding is under increasing pressure from competing for land use, large carnivores and climate change. The governing systems are, however, ill-equipped and unable to address resulting cumulative and interacting impacts. This has led to a difficult situation for reindeer herding due to the loss of land, functionality and flexibility, and proves a challenge for the Nordic states as the legitimacy of reindeer husbandry governance is increasingly contested. Addressing this challenge, this chapter unpacks the discursive and political dimensions of reindeer husbandry governance in Sweden, Norway and Finland. Guided by three broad questions: i) governing what, ii) governing how and iii) governing for and by whom, it explores how problem representations are constructed, handled and contested. The analysis shows that state-led governance was never in fact constructed to address herders' concerns, but was, and remains, based on the states' and competing land uses' problem representations. The chapter, therefore, concludes by identifying the need to revisit the present understanding of "problems", "solutions" and "visions" in reindeer husbandry governance. A key task will be to re-image, or actively seek to change the discursive construction of, reindeer herding as a system-to-be-governed and attune it to the perspectives of the herders.

Pastoralist societies have developed customary institutions to respond to an unpredictable environment and fluctuation in grazing resources for their livestock. This chapter describes how reindeer herders' customary institutions, including laws, norms and rights embedded in social networks, as well as traditional knowledge, structure these responses. Furthermore, it analyses how reindeer herders' customary institutions are integrated into state governance of natural resources or recognized in national legislation. Central to the chapter is the Sámi siida and the corresponding Finnish tokkakunta – both represent customary herding groups that seek to balance the relationship between human–reindeer units to the spatial and temporal availability of grazing resources. The need for revitalization and a better understanding of reindeer herders' customary institutions is identified, as well as an increased recognition of their traditional knowledge in resource management and land use planning to increase the resilience of reindeer husbandry to the cumulative challenges of climate change and resource extraction.

Altres ajuts europeus: P.A.W. was additionally supported by the European Union Fourth Environment and Climate Framework Programme (Project Number ENV4-CT970586)P.A.W. was additionally supported by the European Union Fourth Environment and Climate Framework Programme (Project Number ENV4-CT970586). ; The tundra is warming more rapidly than any other biome on Earth, and the potential ramifications are far-reaching because of global feedback effects between vegetation and climate. A better understanding of how environmental factors shape plant structure and function is crucial for predicting the consequences of environmental change for ecosystem functioning. Here we explore the biome-wide relationships between temperature, moisture and seven key plant functional traits both across space and over three decades of warming at 117 tundra locations. Spatial temperature-trait relationships were generally strong but soil moisture had a marked influence on the strength and direction of these relationships, highlighting the potentially important influence of changes in water availability on future trait shifts in tundra plant communities. Community height increased with warming across all sites over the past three decades, but other traits lagged far behind predicted rates of change. Our findings highlight the challenge of using space-for-time substitution to predict the functional consequences of future warming and suggest that functions that are tied closely to plant height will experience the most rapid change. They also reveal the strength with which environmental factors shape biotic communities at the coldest extremes of the planet and will help to improve projections of functional changes in tundra ecosystems with climate warming.