About the project
Climate change is penetrating all biological processes and production systems in the Arctic. Increased accessibility of its natural resources is transforming the region into an important player in the global economy. This will change the livelihood of northern people who depend on the land.
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The project also has a website at reign.no
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Challenges
Fennoscandian reindeer husbandry represents ecological, socio-economical and institutional gradients as reflected in different adaptations and management regimes. This opens for a comparative research approach; combining modelling with empirical data analyses and semi-experimental approaches within a Social-ecological System framework.
By integrating perspectives from natural and social sciences as well as economics, we will identify key drivers, including internal drivers, and dissect their effects on the industry. This will enable us to evaluate its adaptive capacity and how these challenges can best be met by management actions. The multidisciplinary and multi-site Centre has great potential for intra Nordic scientific achievements and innovations and outreach for natural resource management internationally.
Aims
The overall aim is to understand how climate change and other processes in the Arctic will affect reindeer husbandry in Fennoscandia and how the industry can adapt to these drivers.
Areas of research
We here outline the main challenges for reindeer husbandry:- WP1 - Genetic resources, biodiversity & breeding
- WP2 - Living landscapes – ecologic and social foundations of mobility
- WP3 - Tipping points and resilience
- WP4 - Optimal strategies in a changing world
- WP5 - Bioeconomy
- WP6 - Governing systems
Networking
Competence building by extensive networking including young promising researchers and PhDs across disciplines will fuel the Centre. The Centre will initiate academic arenas and interact closely with stakeholders to serve as an incubator for developing new ideas and research approaches and point to pathways for actions, vital for the industry’s sustainability.
Book
New multidisciplinary book about the reindeer pastoralism in the Northern Fennoscandia
The book “Reindeer Husbandry and Global Environmental Change” is the result of a four-year research project on reindeer husbandry, involving researchers from Norway, Sweden and Finland.
How did the idea for writing a book come about?
During the project, we noticed that even we who are familiar with research on reindeer husbandry sometimes had knowledge gaps about how reindeer husbandry in the respective other countries works, how adaptation strategies can differ or what institutional differences determine how reindeer herders can or cannot interact with the state. Therefore, we realized the need of book to compare the current situation in all three countries. At the same time, it introduces reindeer husbandry, for example its history and interaction with the natural and social environment. Such a book did not exist before, especially not in English.
What is the target audience for the book?
The book is primarily aimed at an academic audience, i.e. researchers from different disciplines and students. As the book covers many different disciplines, from natural sciences to social sciences, we hope to reach a large audience. However, it is written in an easily accessible way. We therefore hope that the book will also be relevant and interesting for readers outside the university, for example in administration, by decision-makers and resource managers. And for reindeer herders who are interested in research, and how collaboration between reindeer herders and researchers could be strengthened to combine different forms of knowledge to understand better how different changes in the world around them could be met. Of course, we also hope to reach the public who are interested in reindeer husbandry.
What is the book about? What challenges does reindeer husbandry face?
The book takes a comparative approach. In the various chapters, we highlight differences and similarities in reindeer husbandry between Norway, Sweden and Finland. We want to demonstrate how reindeer husbandry is affected by different challenges. These can be climate change and predators, societal challenges such as shared land use such as forestry and mining, or how state policies may conflict with reindeer husbandry and reindeer herders’ rights. It also includes chapters on productivity of reindeer and genetic adaptations, reindeer diseases or economic considerations. We also investigate the importance of including reindeer herders' traditional knowledge in policies and decision-making to increase equity in decsion-making. Often, however, all these challenges are connected with each other - and that is exactly what we want to show with the book: that it is often not possible to point out one particular challenge, but that an overall picture is required to understand reindeer husbandry as a socio-ecological system. All chapters thus have a strong forward-looking perspective.
Have there been challenges along the way?
Of course, the pandemic was an obstacle for us. As we could not meet with each other, we could not connect individual chapters in such a way that would have been desirable. Therefore, the different chapters are perhaps less related to each other than was originally planned, because collaboration among the authors was not possible in an optimal way.
Where can anyone who is interested get the book?
It was important for us to enable access to the book for everyone who is interested. Therefore, the book is freely available on the publisher's Routledge website. Of course, it is also available for purchase as a printed copy.
About the book:
Editors are Øystein Holand, Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Norway, Jouko Kumpula, Natural Resources Institute Finland in Finland, and Tim Horstkotte and Jon Moen, Department of Ecology, Environment and Earth Sciences at Umeå University. Read Reindeer Husbandry and Global Environmental Change online at the Routlege website https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003118565/reindeer-husbandry-global-environmental-change-tim-horstkotte-%C3%B8ystein-holand-jouko-kumpula-jon-moen
Other NCoEs in Arctic Research
In addition to ReiGN Nordforsk is financing three other NCoEs in Arctic Research: