Embracing extreme weather and compound events in landscape planning: the case of reindeer husbandry in Northern Sweden

Chain reactions of extreme weather are among the most harmful consequences of climate change on the environment and society.

However, the complexity and uncertainty involved in predicting them makes it difficult to plan for their impacts at the landscape scale – especially when different stakeholders are using that landscape for their respective interests.This project develops strategies for planning at the landscape scale to navigate the impacts of extreme weather and compound events, by examining reindeer husbandry.

To thrive, this livelihood depends on the interaction between weather and environmental variables as well as interactions with other land uses in the landscape, posing a formidable challenge for landscape planners.To understand the impacts of weather and environmental variables on key moments in the herding year, we develop event-based storylines that trace back the causal factors causing these impacts, and investigate how they could develop in the future.

Building on this analysis, we examine how decision-making regarding landscape planning in the face of extreme weather and compound events is conducted in governance bodies to accommodate reindeer husbandry and overlapping land uses. We focus on hidden dynamics between the formal and informal.

Finally, we develop alternatives to landscape planning based on our storylines based on different normative goals: what is to be sustained in a northern landscape increasingly confronted with compounding extreme weather?