Reindeer husbandry represents a major land use in the Barents region, and has been predicted to be adversely affected by climate change. This paper considers the likely response of reindeer husbandry to changes both in climate and in socio-economic circumstances in the four countries of the Barents region from 1990 to 2080. Key natural factors include vegetation distribution, and a range of meteorological variables including temperature, wind, snow cover and freezing of rivers. The potential impact of these factors is evaluated quantitatively using the tolerable windows method, the results of which indicate a general but spatially non-uniform decline in the suitability of the region for reindeer husbandry. Relevant socio-economic factors include regional patterns of politics, management and knowledge. A focus on herders' own perceptions of environmental change and flexibility of response, derived particularly from study sites in Russia, suggests that models of vulnerability to climate change should be tempered by paying greater attention to changes in socio-economic factors. When compared with the potential effect of changing these socioeconomic factors, the vulnerability of reindeer husbandry to projected climate change appears to be comparatively small.

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The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrifice, and for the domestication of the reindeer as the result of hunters' efforts to use sacrifice to control the accidental variables of the hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of ‘trust’ with prey only through highly controlled ritual enactments. We describe two: the famous bear festival of the Amur Gulf region and the consecrated reindeer of the Eveny. Both express the same overall logic by which sacrifice functions as an ideal hunt. The animal is involved in a relation not of domination but of trust, while also undergoing a process of taming. We therefore suggest that the reindeer's domestication may be based not only on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.