WORLD

Climate change brings 'strange weather,' leaves reindeer starving in Sweden's arctic

David Keyton
Associated Press

KIRUNA, Sweden – Thick reindeer fur boots and a fur hat covering most of his face shield Niila Inga from freezing winds as he races his snowmobile up to a mountaintop overlooking his reindeer in the Swedish arctic.

His community herds about 8,000 reindeer year-round, moving them between traditional grazing grounds in the high mountains bordering Norway in the summer and the forests farther east in the winter, just as his forebears in the Sami indigenous community have for generations.

Inga is troubled: His reindeer are hungry, and he can do little about it. Climate change is altering weather patterns and affecting the herd’s food supply.

“If we don’t find better areas for them where they can graze and find food, then the reindeers will starve to death,” he says. Pressured by the mining and forestry industry, and other development that encroaches on grazing land, Sami herding communities fear climate change could mean the end of their traditional lifestyle.

Sami herding communities in Kiruna, Sweden, fear the effects of climate change.

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'Extreme and strange weather' becoming more normal

Slipping his hand from a massive reindeer skin mitten, Inga illustrates the problem, plunging his hand into the crusted snow and pulling out a hard piece of ice close to the soil.

Unusually early snowfall in autumn was followed by rain that froze, trapping food under a thick layer of ice. Unable to eat, the hungry animals scattered from their traditional migration routes in search of new grazing grounds.

Half the herd carried on east as planned, while the rest retreated to the mountains where predators abound, and the risk of avalanches is great.

Elder Sami herders recall that they once had bad winters every decade or so, but Inga says, “Extreme and strange weather are getting more and more normal; it happens several times a year.”

The arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Measurements by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute show the country has warmed 2.95 degrees Fahrenheit compared with preindustrial times. In Sweden’s alpine region, this increase is even greater, with average winter temperatures from 1991 to 2017 up more than 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the 1961-90 average.

Sanna Vannar sets up a barrier in a corral outside Jokkmokk, Sweden, to help load reindeer onto a truck for transportation to winter pastures Nov. 26.

Snowfall is common in these areas, but as temperatures increase, occasional rainfall occurs – and "rain-on-snow" events have devastating effects. The food is still there, but the reindeer can’t reach it. The animals grow weaker, and females sometimes abort their calves while the survivors struggle to make it through the winter.

“We have winter here for eight months a year, and when it starts in October with bad grazing conditions, it won’t get any better,” Inga says.

Sami herders were once nomadic, scattered across a region that spans the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the northwestern corner of Russia. Until the 1960s, this indigenous minority was discouraged from reindeer herding, and their language and culture were suppressed. Today, of the 70,000 Sami, only about 10% herd reindeer, making a limited income from meat, hides and antlers crafted into knife handles.

“Everyone wants to take the reindeers’ area where they find food. But with climate change, we need more flexibility to move around,” says Sanna Vannar, a young herder from a community in the mountains surrounding Jokkmokk, a Sami town north of the Arctic Circle. “Here you can’t find food, but maybe you can find food there, but there they want to clear-cut the forest, and that’s the problem.”

About 10% of the Sami community herd reindeer.

'We can't buy better weather with money'

Vannar, 24, is the president of the Swedish Sami Youth organization and, together with eight other families elsewhere in the world, they launched a legal action in 2018 to force the European Union to set more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This year, the European General Court rejected their case on procedural grounds, but the plaintiffs appealed.

“We’ve said we don’t want money because we can’t buy better weather with money,” Vannar says. “We’ve said we need that the EU take action, and they need to do it now.”

The EU’s new executive commission is likely to present a "European Green Deal" on Wednesday to coincide with a United Nations climate conference in Madrid.

Herders started working with Stockholm University, hoping to advance research that will broaden understanding about changing weather patterns.

As part of this rare collaboration between Sami and science, weather stations deep in the forests of the Laevas community record air and ground temperature, rainfall, wind speed and snowfall density. Sami ancestral knowledge of the land and the climate complements analysis of data gathered, offering a more detailed understanding of weather events.

“With this data we can connect my traditional knowledge, and I see what the effects of it are,” says Inga who has worked on the project since 2013 and co-wrote scientific papers with Ninis Rosqvist, a professor of natural geography at Stockholm University.

Rosqvist directs a field station operating since the 1940s in the Swedish alpine region measuring glaciers and changes in snow and ice. Through the collaboration with Inga, she realized that less “exciting” areas in the forests may be most crucial to understanding the impacts of changing climate.

“As a scientist, I can measure that something is happening, but I don’t know the impact of it on, in this case, the whole ecosystem. And that’s why you need their knowledge,” she says.

Rosqvist hopes this research can help Sami communities argue their case with decision-makers legislating land-use rights.

Back in the forest, Inga releases onto the winter pastures a group of reindeer that was separated from the herd when the animals scattered this autumn.

Several other herders spent more than a week high in the mountains searching for the other half of the herd and trying to bring the animals down, to no avail.

“As long as they are forced to stay there, they’ll get into worse and worse condition,” Inga says.

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