Many attempts have been made worldwide to implement community-based conservation to gain a more inclusive protection of biological diversity and ecosystem services. In a recent national reform, the management of protected areas was devolved from the Norwegian government to local conservation boards. The main goals were to reduce local resistance toward conservation and ameliorate threats to biodiversity. ...

In northernmost Norway the right to own and manage the land in Finnmark, was transferred from the state to the the Finnmark Estate (FeFo) in 2005. The land tenure arrangement was a result of land claims made by the indigenous Sami people of Norway. The resources and the land that was previously managed to the best for all Norwegian citizens by the state, is now managed to the best for the ...

Rapid Arctic warming, manifested as thawing permafrost, loss of coastal sea ice, sea level rise, and climate-related extreme events, is particularly challenging for Indigenous people relying on wild food to sustain their livelihood and culture. The adoption of new technologies could provide specific capabilities to confront vulnerabilities associated with fishing and hunting activities, but it could ...

Abstract Community-based management (CBM) has been implemented in socio-ecological systems (SES) worldwide. CBM has also been the prevailing policy in Sa´mi pastoral SES in Norway, but the outcomes tend to vary extensively among resource groups (‘‘siidas’’). We asked why do some siidas self-organize to manage common pool resources sustainably and others do not? To answer this question we used a ...

We use demographic and economic indicators to analyze spatial differences and temporal trends across 18 regions surrounding the Arctic Ocean. Multifactor and cluster analysis were used on 10 indicators reflecting income, employment and demography from 1995 to 2008. The main difference is between regions with high population densities, low natural growth rate, and low unemployment (Russia, Norway ...

Prior research has examined the relationship between physical landscapes and ecosystem services, but the distribution of ecosystem services by land tenure and protected areas is less developed. We analyze the spatial distribution of participatory mapped ecosystem values, as indicators of ecosystem services, to determine their relationship with land tenure in southern Norway, a region characterized ...

Coastal areas are especially important to human well-being with half the world's population living within 60 km of the sea and three-quarters of all large cities located in the coastal zone. Supporting and regulatory ecosystem services in coastal areas have received considerable research attention given human vulnerability to climate change, but cultural ecosystem services in the coastal zone are ...

There is an urgent need to understand and address the risks associated with a warming climate for ecosystems and societies in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. There are major gaps in our understanding of the complex effects of climate change—including extreme events, cascading impacts across ecosystems, and the underlying socioecological dynamics and feedbacks—all of which need collaborative efforts ...

To ensure economic viability over time, any efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals need to reconcile conservation with development interventions. Particularly, in marginal and risk prone areas erosion of resilience could make production systems more susceptible to environmental risks that compromise the economic security. By longitudinal analyses of long-term data records we investigated the ...