Climate Seen Stoking Arctic Indigenous Land Claims
Climate Seen Stoking Arctic Indigenous Land Claims NORWAY: April 3, 2008 OSLO - Global warming has opened the European Arctic to firms exploiting timber, oil, gas and metals, and intensified a land rights battle with Sami reindeer herders whose way of life is under threat, an indigenous leader said. Milder temperatures mean that birch and pine forests are edging north in Russia and the Nordic nations, shrinking the chill pastures where reindeer graze on lichen, said Lars-Anders Baer, a herder and president of the Sami Parliament in Sweden.