A Hundred Thousand Herders, Nine Countries, One Warming Range

Reindeer herding is practised by more than 20 Indigenous peoples across nine countries, from Sápmi to Mongolia, and roughly 100,000 herders depend on pastures that climate change is making unreadable — icing events, shifting freeze-up, and industrial development fragmenting the migration routes that make herding possible at all. The International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry was established by Norway in 2005 at Kautokeino and hosts the secretariat of the Association of World Reindeer Herders, which is the point: it is infrastructure for herders to talk to each other across borders that were drawn through their pastures. Its EALLU project, led by reindeer-herding youth and endorsed by the Arctic Council, documented herding food cultures and adaptation knowledge across the circumpolar north, producing a cookbook that won the Gourmand award in 2018 — traditional knowledge published as something to be used rather than archived.