"The Yamal Nenets are a truly nomadic people who continue to thrive much as they have for centuries despite immense political, economic and ecological shocks," said Bruce Forbes of the University of Lapland, Finland. "While it seems like an endless, frozen wasteland to outsiders, the Yamal tundra territory has been occupied rather fully, if sparsely, for over 1000 years."
Forbes and colleagues at the University of Joensuu, Finland, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Cambridge, UK, have studied the Yamal-Nenets for more than four years in order to understand the factors that have made their way of life so resilient. Yamal is the only tundra region in the former Soviet Union where numbers of people and animals have increased in post-Soviet times. The research should not only help with plans for the Nenets' future survival but could also offer tips for other communities.
Around half of the Yamal Peninsula's 10,000 Nenet people make their living in the traditional way by herding reindeer. In recent years they have faced threats to their lifestyle from the fall of the Soviet Union, warming temperatures, and the oil and gas industry, which has brought workers and infrastructure such as roads and pipelines, as well as degradation to rivers and lakes. Average temperatures in the region have increased by 1–2 °C over the past 30 years, and the area contains some of the largest known untapped gas deposits in the world. Although gas is not yet being removed, extensive exploration work has taken place.
The Nenet have responded by adjusting their migration routes and timing, avoiding disturbed and degraded areas, and developing new economic practices and social interaction, for example by trading with workers who have moved into gas villages in the area.
To carry out the study, the team used a combination of satellite-based mapping, social anthropology and examining ground-level changes in the vegetation that the reindeer feed on. The tundra is becoming dominated by graminoid (grass) species, rather than by shrubs, because of industrial disturbance, and heavy grazing and trampling by reindeer.
"We found that free access to open space has been critical for success, as each new threat has arisen, and that institutional constraints and drivers were as important as the documented ecological changes," said Forbes. "Our findings point to concrete ways in which the Nenets can continue to coexist as their lands are increasingly fragmented by extensive natural gas production and a rapidly warming climate."
The ability to roam freely enables people and animals to exploit or avoid a wide range of natural and manmade habitats, say the researchers.
Forbes believes that for nomadism to continue over the next few decades, institutions will need to target mutual coexistence. And top-down management is not enough. "Management must be adaptive," he said. "This is an old principle in business, which needs to fix quickly what does not work in order to remain profitable, but seems to have failed in fields like conservation biology. Species continue to disappear and ecosystems degrade around the world despite the large number of ostensibly protected areas and ostensibly proactive environmental management regimes."
The researchers believe that they have found mechanisms that can bridge the gap between top-level administrators and experienced personnel and local residents on the ground. "There is a broad movement afoot lately to set up mitigation and adaptation regimes to handle rapid environmental change," said Forbes. "Our work shows that local people have an important role to play, one that is every bit as useful and informative as that of the scientists and administrators charged with managing complex social-ecological systems."
Now Forbes and colleagues plan to extend their analysis further back into the 1000 years that the Nenets have lived in the area. "There is much yet to find out about how they dealt with past changes, since the climate has been by no means static in the last millennium," said Forbes. "It would appear that the Nenets have been resilient for a long time and therefore, as scientists, we still have a lot to learn from them and from the tundra itself."
The researchers reported their work in PNAS.