Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Chapter 2 · Status of the natural and human environments

– or, especially in the Russian case, between different land uses such as reindeer husbandry and oil and gas exploration.While reindeer husbandry is an industry or use with few practitioners today, especially in Fennoscandia (with a small minority of Saami people, as well as Torne Valley Finns practicing in specific areas of Sweden, and Saami and Finns in Finland) it is one with a long history of traditional rights to land use and can be argued to hold a culture-carrying role. There are about 4700 reindeer herders in Sweden (Sametinget, 2015), 3100 in Norway (Reindriftsforvaltningen, 2015), 4500 in Finland, of which 1200 are Saami (Paliskuntain yhdistys, 2014) and about 20,000 in northwest Russia. The Nenets Autonomous area is home to about 41,000 indigenous Nenets, of which roughly 1500 are engaged in reindeer husbandry, mostly in the form of family-based enterprises or cooperatives (Kumpula et al., 2011; Forbes, 2013; ICR, 2016).Around 5000 Nenets are active in reindeer husbandry in the Yamal-Nenets area (Forbes et al., 2009). Reindeer husbandry thus provides an example of both traditional and local use. It also provides an example of the integration of reindeer husbandry as an economic sector in many of these cases: Saami may for instance own both forested land and reindeer, or work both in forestry and reindeer husbandry.Themain income from reindeer husbandry in the Nordic areas results from the sale of meat, such as to regional slaughter houses and companies that then package it for further sale, through supermarkets (resulting in the broad availability of the meat) or directly to customers (which is different to indigenous subsistence focus in Arctic literature, see Keskitalo 2008a; Heikkinen et al. 2011). In the Nordic areas, as for other types of resource use, reindeer husbandry involves substantial use of technology, such as snowmobiles for regular monitoring in winter, helicopters if herds are dispersed, and trailer trucks to move reindeer between herding areas if natural paths are not available (Keskitalo, 2008a). However, the costs of motorization, supplementary winter feeding, fuel, and use of information and communication technology also place high demands on profitability in reindeer husbandry (Heikkinen et al., 2007, 2012; Turunen and Vuojala-Magga, 2014). Reindeer husbandry requires large areas for grazing and migration, areas which are increasingly fragmented due to urban growth, development of road and rail infrastructure, new extractive industries, power plants, increasing tourism and cabin developments, and predators; the accumulated impacts of which pose a large threat to continued reindeer husbandry. Recruitment problems are also arising as many young Saami from reindeer husbandry families are leaving for higher education and employment in urban areas. As a result, reindeer husbandry is sometimes combined with tourism or handicrafts or supplemented by other employment, and there is now a focus on increasing branding of reindeer meat products to increase market potential (Tyler et al., 2007; Keskitalo, 2008a; Rantamäki-Lahtinen, 2008).As a consequence, the compound economic impact of reindeer herding to the local and regional economy is likely to be much higher than the sole economic income of reindeer meat production. In Russia, reindeer herding for instance in the Nenets Autonomous area has seen recent growth, partly due to support from the regional government that benefits from resource- related investments. In addition to federal laws, the traditional land use and reindeer herding activities of the Nenets are

leased to large-scale forest industry, while forest in Norway, Sweden and Finland is owned by a mix of owners including state, church, municipalities, state-owned corporations, other large-scale forest companies and industry, and small-scale family forest owners often organized into forest owners cooperatives (especially in southern areas). Practitioners of reindeer husbandry typically possess parallel user rights on land, and the Right of Common Access provides access to resources such as berry picking free of charge – something that has recently come under discussion as it is now also used by berry picking industries bringing in emigrant workers (e.g. Thai seasonal workers) to harvest berries (Sténs and Sandström, 2013). In forestry, the infrastructure necessary to conduct large-scale operations has evolved alongside the development of related, often vertically integrated industries such as saw-milling, paper, and pulp.Large-scale forest companies originating in the Nordic countries,such as SCAand Stora Enso,are thus largely globalizing corporations,owning both forest and large-scale sawmilling,pulp and paper plants.Owing to its importance toGDP and its export value, forestry has often been granted priority in land use and is now a highly intensive industry (with most forests planted from genetically selected plant material, fertilized, and cleaned and thinned prior to logging) in Sweden and Finland.In Finland andRussia,forestry companies hold specific rights that guarantee benefits to forestry compared to other land uses (such as reindeer husbandry),and in Sweden,forestry is defined in law as‘ongoing land use’ in a separate Forest Act that makes forestry planning separate frommunicipal planning (e.g. Stjernström et al., 2013). While forestry has historically been strongly supported in local areas due to its role as a large employer, the local legitimacy of forestry land use has decreased as forestry has increasingly substituted employment for technology, for example replacing local harvesting teams with mobile entrepreneur units. This has resulted in discussions of how to develop land uses that provide local income, including an increasing focus on tourism as a partial substitute for employment in forestry (Keskitalo, 2008a,b). The decline in use of paper and print media through increasing digitalization has led to increased competitionwithin the forest industry at an international level, and to a greater extent placed the focus on other options, such as forest-based bio-energy (FAO,2008).Given the relatively high proportions of private small-scale family forest owners in the Nordic countries, coupled with high environmental protection demands, forestry actors, however, regularly note the relation between protection and production demands as a competition (Ambjörnsson et al., 2016). Environmental protection areas such as nature reserves are largest in the northern parts of the respective countries and are also influenced by EU and other international regulation (Keskitalo and Pettersson, 2012). Environmental protection may also support other industries. For instance, in Russia, the designation of a national park encompassing northern parts of Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land with adjacent waters in 2009 is expected to encourage tourismin the area (Andrew,2014). The situation in forest use illustrates that developing trade- offs in forest use between different users is a highly complex issue. Beyond the conflict between forestry and environmental protection interests, one of the most long-standing issues concerns use-conflict between forestry and reindeer husbandry