Visualizing Future Challenges In The Arctic

By GRID-Arendal

February 27^th, 2016

All over the Arctic indigenous peoples are feeling the effects of human-induced changes to their livelihoods.

And while the effects of climate change are important, for reindeer herders there is an even more pressing concern – the consequences of lost pastures and land fragmentation caused by industrial development and other land-use changes. Like other Arctic peoples, the herders are looking for ways to understand the cumulative effects of future changes to the land on which their livelihood depends.

GRID-Arendal’s Kathrine Johnsen was in Kautokeino in the north of Norway recently to participate in a workshop addressing these concerns.

The purpose of the workshop was to assess the suitability of two tools, RenGIS and GLOBIO3, for mapping and predicting how climate, land-use and other human-induced changes will affect biodiversity in the Arctic. The results from the workshop will be used to visualize past and future changes in different locations in the region.

The next step will be to work together with herding communities to gather information to visualize the local impacts of predicted changes on reindeer husbandry. The outcome will be a refined tool that addresses the herders’ need to understand, communicate, mitigate and adapt to the impacts of current and future changes.

The workshop was a joint event organized by the Nomadic Herders Sápmi and ECONOR-III projects, and drew representatives from the International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry, Swedish University of Agricultural Science, Plansup, a consultancy firm based in the Netherlands, Statistics Norway and GRID-Arendal. GRID-Arendal provided expertise on reindeer husbandry and environmental change.