Principal Investigators: Erik Reinert, Carina Keskitalo, Ellen Inga Turi

Objectives: To determine what non-climate factors influence herders’ ability to adapt to changing climate conditions and the constraints on, and opportunities for, coping associated with national and international institutions, governance and customary rights.

Method: Integration of existing traditional tacit knowledge (Work Package 3) into codified social science using case-studies with an analogue approach. Data on environmental variation, actors’ responses and what constituted constraints or opportunities on their responses will be gathered through empirical study of selected focus groups (siida). A typology of different social groups according to types of economic activities and key social variables will be created, along with historical and seasonal climatological profiles for each group.

Tasks in this Work Package include an identification of how the effects of climate variability and change influence the development of land use rights in the context of customary and siida rights. Also, to determine how social and economic conditions influence vulnerability and the adaptive capacity of reindeer herding communities to the consequences of climate variation and change. Finally, this Work Package intends to determine how market forces, ‘ownership’ in markets and the concept of local added value are or will be affected by climate change.