Study title

The HUMANOR project is rooted in participatory action research taking place over many years in partnerships between scientists and stakeholders. Our innovative approach includes stakeholders in research aimed at more flexible and collaborative governance. The core of this project was to sample soils for evidence of ancient reindeer husbandry.Ongoing climate change in the 21st century will instigate profound societal transformations in the 21st century. Yet, our knowledge of how such transformations can be achieved in an equitable and sustainable manner is limited. The HUMANOR project investigates historical transformations of mobile pastoralist social-ecological systems (SESs) for clues about which pathways may lead to such transformations. We comparatively study SESs that have undergone profound climatic fluctuations in the last centuries (indigenous Sami, Nenets, Evenki and Mongolian pastoralists) while maintaining their livelihoods through a host of incremental and qualitative shifts. Although these systems are increasingly being exposed to rapid climate change (e.g. the Arctic warming faster than lower latitudes), our understanding of SES response capacities is limited to adaptations within the current systems. We propose that a long-term focus on human-animal relations and the general socio-economic contexts may illustrate how people can deal with abrupt changes (including massive environmental shocks) and re-create these systems. Our focus is on the complex drivers of social-ecological transformations of recent decades and centuries that include climate variation, land use change, governance forms, institutional change (including legislation and social norms) and markets. We expect to show that although it is an ancient livelihood, still practiced across vast areas of N Eurasia, pastoralism is constantly undergoing shifts in the nexus of feedbacks between humans, animals and the environment. This comparative trans-disciplinary study is performed across...