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The global challenges that humanity faces are addressed in various global agreements, such as the Paris Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity. However, all global goals require local implementation and must be locally accepted. Adaptation and transformation will claim large land resources, such as infrastructures, wind farms, mines and intense land use for bioenergy. This may exacerbate already existing conflict over land use and the rights to resources, not least in northern peripheral areas. Reindeer pastoralism is affected by all of these interwoven processes, which gives a need for more holistic regional land use planning. This chapter summarizes some of the factors that have contributed to a lack of such planning and points to the importance of including reindeer herders as ‘rightsholders’ and their traditional knowledge in a transition to a just and sustainable society.

Traditional grazing areas in Europe have declined substantially over the last century. Specifically, in northern Fennoscandia, the grazing land is disturbed by cumulative land-use pressures. Here we analysed the configuration of the grazing land for reindeer and sheep in northern Fennoscandia in relation to the concurrent land-use pressures from tourism, road and railway networks, forestry, industrial and wind energy facilities, together with predator presence and climate change. Our results show that 85% of the region is affected by at least one land-use pressure and 60% is affected by multiple land-use pressures, co-occurring with predator presence and rising temperatures. As such, a majority of the grazing land is exposed to cumulative pressures in northern Fennoscandia. We stress that, if the expansion of cumulative pressures leads to grazing abandonment of disturbed areas and grazing intensification in other areas, it could irreversibly change northern vegetation and the Fennoscandian mountain landscape.

Reindeer husbandry has a long history of sharing landscapes with a multitude of other forms of land use. By competing for space, industrial resource developments from the early 20th century onwards have affected where, when and how the landscape can be used for reindeer grazing. Extending from the local to the landscape level, these impacts can reduce pastures either directly or indirectly as a result of increasing landscape fragmentation or changing reindeer behaviour. Furthermore, environmental drivers influence the dynamics of forage availability or accessibility for reindeer. The observed trend of shrinking pastures in the three countries is caused by these cumulative impacts. As a consequence, grazing pressure on the remaining pastures increases, and it curtails reindeer herders’ options to respond to the challenges of climate change. Reversing the continuing decrease in pastures requires the restoration of grazing resources and increasing landscape connectivity to facilitate movement and grazing rotation. However, socio-political incentives are also required to sustain reindeer pastures in the future. This includes an increase in the influence of reindeer herders on land use decisions and the inclusion of their traditional ecological knowledge of pasture management to identify alternative approaches to natural resource management.

This volume offers a holistic understanding of the environmental and societal challenges that affect reindeer husbandry in Fennoscandia today.

Reindeer husbandry is a livelihood with a long traditional heritage and cultural importance. Like many other pastoral societies, reindeer herders are confronted with significant challenges. Covering Norway, Sweden and Finland – three countries with many differences and similarities – this volume examines how reindeer husbandry is affected by and responds to global environmental change and resource extraction in boreal and arctic social- ecological systems. Beginning with an historical overview of reindeer husbandry, the volume analyses the realities of the present from different perspectives and disciplines. Genetics, behavioural ecology of reindeer, other forms of land use, pastoralists’ norms and knowledge, bio- economy and governance structures all set the stage for the complex internal and externally imposed dynamics within reindeer husbandry. In- depth analyses are devoted to particularly urgent challenges, such as land- use conflicts, climate change and predation, identified as having a high potential to shape the future pathways of the pastoral identity and productivity. These futures, with their risks and opportunities, are explored in the final section, offering a synthesis of the comparative approach between the three countries that runs as a recurring theme through the book. With its richness and depth, this volume contributes significantly to the understanding of the substantial impacts on pastoralist communities in northernmost Europe today, while highlighting viable pathways to maintaining reindeer husbandry for the future.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of both the natural and social sciences who work on natural resource management, global environmental change, pastoralism, ecology, social- ecological systems, rangeland management and Indigenous studies.

This introductory chapter presents reindeer pastoralism as a social-ecological system and outlines its essential components. Reindeer herders – the pastoralists of the north, the reindeer and the natural environment of Fennoscandia – are briefly introduced. The chapter describes how different historical, natural and social environments lead to different management forms in Finland, Norway and Sweden. Further, it provides a historical overview of reindeer pastoralism deeply embedded in Sámi and local culture and gives some key statistics of the situation today. Finally, it outlines the major challenges that reindeer pastoralism is facing today within the three Fennoscandian countries. This chapter therefore provides the background for the detailed analyses in the main part of this book.

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.

Currently, the main tools for assessing and managing ecosystem services at large scales are maps providing snapshots of their potential supply. However, many ecosystems change over short timescales; thus, such maps soon become inaccurate. Here we show high rates of short-term dynamics of three key forest ecosystem services: wood production, bilberry production and topsoil carbon storage. Almost 85% of the coldspots and 65% of the hotspots for these services had changed into a different state over a ten-year period. Wood production showed higher rates of short-term dynamics than bilberry production and carbon storage. The high rates of dynamics mean that static snapshot ecosystem service maps provide limited information for assessing and managing multifunctional, dynamic landscapes, such as forests. We advocate that dynamic, spatially explicit tools to assess and manage ecosystem service dynamics be further developed and applied in post-2020 biodiversity and ecosystem service policy supporting frameworks.

Today, climate change and competing land use practices are threatening rangelands around the world and the pastoral societies that rely on them. Reindeer husbandry practised by the indigenous Sami people is an example. In Sweden, approximately 70% of the most productive lichen pastures (important in winter) has been lost, either completely or because of a reduction in forage quality, as a result of competing land use (primarily commercial forestry). The remaining pastures are small and fragmented. Yet, the number of reindeer in Sweden shows no general decline. We investigated the strategies that have allowed reindeer herders to sustain their traditional livelihood despite a substantial loss of pastures and thus natural winter forage for their reindeer. Changes in harvest strategy and herd structure may partially explain the observed dynamics, and have increased herd productivity and income, but were not primarily adopted to counteract forage loss. The introduction of supplementary feeding, modern machinery, and equipment has assisted the herders to a certain extent. However, supplementary feeding and technology are expensive. In spite of governmental support and optimized herd productivity and income, increasing costs provide low economic return. We suggest that the increased economical and psychosocial costs caused by forage and pasture losses may have strong effects on the long-term sustainability of reindeer husbandry in Sweden.

Fennoscandian reindeer husbandry represents ecological, social-economical and institutional gradients reflected in different adaptations and management regimes. This provides for an interdisciplinary comparative research approach, between and within countries. By integrating perspectives from natural and social sciences, ReiGN engages in (1) identifying key drivers, (2) their effects on this pastoral system, and (3) how they are linked to ecological, social and political differences. In this chapter we outline the main challenges confronting this diverse and dynamic social-ecological system within a globalization and climate change perspective. This enables us to evaluate its adaptive capacities as well as its potential to stimulate policy decisions, societal responses and management actions for a viable reindeer husbandry. In this chapter we present reindeer husbandry in a historical context and introduce key concepts of Sámi reindeer husbandry to ease the understanding of our findings presented and discussed. We also offer an overview of the main research areas in which the ReiGN NCoE has conducted its work over the past several years.

Many traditional pastoralist systems are greatly impacted by cumulative encroachments of other land users and by climate change. Understanding land degradation and the adaptive capacity of people who are dependent on the rangelands is an urgent priority for many areas in the world. In this research we explore how changing environmental conditions affect herding strategies on winter pastures and the role of indigenous and local traditional knowledge (ILK) in Sami reindeer husbandry. Our results indicate that traditional Sami reindeer herding strategies are still practiced, but that rapidly changing environmental circumstances are forcing herders into uncharted territories where these traditional strategies and the transmission of knowledge between generations may be of limited use. For example, rotational grazing is no longer possible as all pastures are being used, and changes in climate result in unpredictable weather patterns unknown to earlier generations.