Industrial extraction of natural resources has led to degraded ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, and species extinction. Improved management of resources is now an urgent concern. In Arctic Fennoscandia the effects of resource extraction are of particular concern. In this chapter we use examples from indigenous Sámi reindeer herding in northern Sweden and salmon fishing in the Kemijoki river valley in northern Finland. We show how the emergence of industrial mega systems has led to accumulating industrial land use that now severely encroaches on the ecosystems that reindeer and salmon depend on. The negative effects from encroachments is also further exacerbated by climate change. As a result, the culture-bearing activities of reindeer herding and salmon fishing that have shaped identities in Arctic Fennoscandia for centuries are facing rapidly deteriorating conditions. There are large-scale plans in northern Sweden and Finland to increase mining, wind energy production, and forestry. To avoid, or at least mitigate, long-lasting effects on the ecosystems represented by reindeer and salmon, adequate assessments of cumulative effects from industrial developments are urgently needed.

Industrial development and resource exploitation in Arctic Fennoscandia have caused cascading and cumulative effects on environment and people since the late nineteenth century. The increasing demand for minerals and metals to facilitate a ‘green transition’ now pose further challenges for environmental and social management. In this chapter we present local attempts to provide additional knowledge and understanding of the full impact from multiple human activities beyond conventional corporate-led impact assessments. With the aim to reveal the full range of impacts from industrial developments on their livelihood, Laevas, Gabna and Semisjaur-Njarg Sámi reindeer herding communities in Sweden produced their own assessment of cumulative effects based on detailed analysis of their land use needs. The municipal level is an important local land use planning forum. Our case examples from Sodankylä municipality in Finland exemplify how challenging it may be to fully understand and manage cumulative impacts from new industrial projects. We note that effects of climate change are not yet incorporated in any assessments of impacts in any satisfactory manner.

Assessing potential drivers of and linkages between sea ice retreat or thinning across Arctic Russia and maintenance of the ancient and unique social-ecological systems of the Indigenous reindeer-herding Nenets is a pressing task. Sea ice loss is accelerating in the Barents and Kara Seas in the northwestern region of Arctic Russia. Warming summer air temperatures in recent decades have been linked to more frequent and sustained summer high-pressure systems over West Siberia but not to sea ice retreat. At the same time, autumn/winter rain-on-snow events across the region have become more frequent and intense. Two major rain-on-snow events during November 2006 and 2013 led to massive winter reindeer mortality episodes on Yamal Peninsula, where tundra nomadism remains a vitally important livelihood activity for the indigenous Nenets.

Here we review evidence for autumn atmospheric warming and precipitation increases over Arctic coastal lands in proximity to Barents and Kara sea ice loss. Realizing mutual coexistence of tundra nomadism within the Arctic’s largest natural gas complex under a warming climate will require ready access to and careful interpretation of real-time meteorological and sea-ice data and modelling, as well as meaningful consultation with local communities.

As a Sami reindeer herder who subsequently worked with the regional reindeer management administration before running his own business to make tents designed for herders, the author has spent his entire life in Kautokeino, Norway, connected to reindeer herding. He reflects on the social, environmental, institutional and economic changes in reindeer herding that he has observed during his lifetime.

This chapter presents a co-produced research that took place since 2009 between interdisciplinary scientists and herders from a Sami reindeer community in northern Sweden. This research was conceived in response to a participatory mapping program, the Reindeer Husbandry Plan (RHP), led by the Swedish Forest Agency. The RHP is based on a digital tool compiling and mapping habitat use by reindeer herding communities. Mapping land use, even with participatory methods, is a powerful tool which could lead to the best or the worst, despite initial good intentions. Knowing how zoning and mapping the best available pastures was a complex issue in a changing subarctic environment, we wondered how the RHP would succeed in such a difficult enterprise. How could Sami herders map 'good pastures' which can suddenly become bad, while less good pastures, can, according to circumstances, become the best choice? The purpose of the co-produced project was to include the complexity of Sami herders’ knowledge and worldviews, their land management and their science of the snow, into the RHP, while developing an original methodology to map the use of winter grazing lands by Sami reindeer herders in northern Sweden.