The Shrinking Resource Base of Pastoralism: Saami Reindeer Husbandry in a Climate of Change

Abstract

The productive performance of large ungulates in extensive pastoral grazing systems is modulated simultaneously by the effects of climate change and human intervention independent of climate change. The latter includes the expansion of private, civil and military activity and infrastructure and the erosion of land rights. We used Saami reindeer husbandry in Norway as a model in which to examine trends in, and to compare the influence of, both effects on a pastoral grazing system. Downscaled projections of mean annual temperature over the principal winter pasture area (Finnmarksvidda) closely matched empirical observations across 34 years to 2018. The area, therefore, is not only warming but seems likely to continue to do so. Warming notwithstanding, 50-year (1969–2018) records of local weather (temperature, precipitation and characteristics of the snowpack) demonstrate considerable annual and decadal variation which also seems likely to continue and alternately to amplify and to counter net warming. Warming, moreover, has both positive and negative effects on ecosystem services that influence reindeer. The effects of climate change on reindeer pastoralism are evidently neither temporally nor spatially uniform, nor indeed is the role of climate change as a driver of change in pastoralism even clear. The effects of human intervention on the system, by contrast, are clear and largely negative. Gradual liberalization of grazing rights from the 18th Century has been countered by extensive loss of reindeer pasture. Access to ~50% of traditional winter pasture was lost in the 19th Century owing to the closure of international borders to the passage of herders and their reindeer. Subsequent to this the area of undisturbed pasture within Norway has decreased by 71%. Loss of pasture due to piecemeal development of infrastructure and to administrative encroachment that erodes herders' freedom of action on the land that remains to them, are the principal threats to reindeer husbandry in Norway today. These tangible effects far exceed the putative effects of current climate change on the system. The situation confronting Saami reindeer pastoralism is not unique: loss of pasture and administrative, economic, legal and social constraints bedevil extensive pastoral grazing systems across the globe.

Interplays between changing biophysical and social dynamics under climate change: Implications for limits to sustainable adaptation in food systems

“…Multiple climatic and ecological factors influence plant growth; hence, increased temperatures do not automatically lead to an increased pasture growing seasons. Projections also show increasingly warmer and wetter weather in coming decades, including a higher frequency of extreme weather events, earlier springs, warmer summers, prolonged growth season, increased frequency of freeze–thaw cycles, decrease in snow cover and duration, and more frequent rainfall and snowfall (Hanssen‐Bauer et al, 2015; Riseth et al, 2020; Risvoll & Hovelsrud, 2016; Tyler et al, 2021). While the snow is projected to reduce significantly or even disappear along the Nordland County coastline, the amount of snow inland in the mountainous region is expected to increase (Hanssen‐Bauer et al, 2015).…”

“…From the beginning of the 20th century, cross‐border herding between Norway and Sweden was increasingly restricted, following the loss of a functional border grazing convention and increased border restrictions. The blocking of natural migration routes exacerbates the problem of reduced pasture availability, which has created great unpredictability for herders’ migratory patterns and restricted access to vast areas of traditional winter pastures (Tyler et al, 2021).…”

Grazing Into the Anthropocene or Back to the Future?

“…As areas or resources acquire monetary value, it becomes profitable to excise the valuable bits that warrant "development, " leaving behind a fragmented, shrunken, residual rangeland environment for those productive activities such as pastoralism that are less susceptible to investment and intensification. Frequently, neither land use zoning nor the reservation of land by treaty have halted this process (Huntsinger and Hopkinson, 1996;Plieninger et al, 2012;Tyler et al, 2020).…”

In the trap of interacting indirect and direct drivers: the disintegration of extensive, traditional grassland management in Central and Eastern Europe

“…According to the local farmers, the direct drivers (climate change and land-use change) have so far not irreversibly affected the operation of extensive, traditional land-use systems, but socioeconomic and political interventions have placed these systems under considerable pressure (cf. Tyler at al. 2021).…”