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Reindeer herders' perceptions of and responses to climate change

Reindeer herders' perceptions of and responses to climate change

2003-2005

This research was part of a big EU-research effort to assess vulnerability to climate change in the Barents region, called BALANCE. The team at Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge investigated in an interdisciplinary way the possible effects of climate change in the Russian part of the research region in northeast Europe. The anthropological part of the project dealt with social vulnerabilities and the perception of nature by the local reindeer herding population. The research focused on ways how tundra residents relate to their land and how they enact their knowledge about the environment in their everyday and long-term reindeer herding decisions.

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In the Soviet Union herders in some parts of the country were flown to their work shifts in the tundra by helicopter - a practice that is now dying out due to the end of Soviet subsidy policies.

Where as the so-called TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) often focuses on peoples' knowledge of vegetation in the first place, a broader definition is applied in this case. Important here are the reindeer herders' knowledge of the weather, of various animals in their interaction with plants and humans, of anthropogenic factors influencing the environment such as the extraction of mineral resources, and of the topography of the land used by them in comparison to the land used by neighbouring groups. These ecological views were analysed alongside the present social conditions, which are directly related to the break up of the Soviet Union over ten years ago. Here, the main focus was on problems related to the loss of mobility of the reindeer herders, their families being torn apart between villages and the tundra, difficulties in implementing a market economy, and the unstable property relations that occur when former collective farms compete with newly evolving private reindeer herding enterprises.

Fieldwork also involved intensive cooperation with a community of private reindeer herders which had just split up with the former collective reindeer farm. The research team documented through participant observation and unstructured interviews in detail the changes in land use as a consequence of institutional restructuring in reindeer herding. These had generated a new process of 'learning the land' by reindeer herders, which was documented jointly with the research team. One outcome is a detailed map drawn by the herders that tracks the changes in land use between 2002 and 2005. The map presents the first detailed study of day to day and seasonal spatial patterns among reindeer nomads after the Soviet Union presenting the nomads' own perspective.

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Petr Taleev from the 'Ilebts' community showing his map of land use, reflecting the learning process of the land by humans and animals.

Thus, this was an integrated approach to the reindeer herders' perceptions of change and their possible responses to them. The outcome of that research is soon to be published in a special volume of the journal "Climatic Change", where the research contributed to an integrated assessment model for the Barents Sea region.

Get an idea about fieldwork and results from this photo-poster.