Climate seen stoking Arctic indigenous land claims

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - 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.

"This will make the fight over land rights even more important," he told Reuters on Wednesday. "If the circumstances for reindeer herding change dramatically then we need to have other foundations to work on."

"One thing is if we lose the reindeer. The other is if we lose the land. Then we are out of business," he said.

Global warming, blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel largely on human burning of fossil fuels, is happening twice as fast in the Arctic as the rest of the globe because darker soil and water, once exposed, soak up more heat than ice and snow.

This winter was the mildest on record in parts of the Nordic region and the change has enticed businesses to move into the previously inaccessible region.

Pulp and paper producers may expand operations as trees grow further north. Oil and gas companies are looking for new deposits from Alaska to the Barents Sea and mining companies are interested by Arctic deposits ranging from gold to uranium.

"Previously these resources were locked up by a harsh environment and a lot of ice," Baer said from a conference of indigenous peoples in Darwin, Australia.