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1. Utilizing Extractive Transportation Infrastructures for Subsistence Livelihoods: Experience of Evenki Communities in Eastern Siberia

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su162310583  

   Kuklina, Vera; Filippova, Viktoriya; Krasnoshtanova, Natalia; Savvinova, Antonina; Bogdanov, Viktor; Kuklina, Mariia (December 2024, Sustainability)

   The availability of natural resources drives the exploration and transformation of remote regions in the Arctic and beyond. Extractive infrastructure is one of the major sources of industrial development and environmental impact on landscapes. For Indigenous people, these landscapes are homely environments full of sentient beings, and for other local communities, they provide a wide variety of subsistence and hunting resources. While extractive infrastructure violence is the evident issue for many Indigenous communities, there are more complicated situations where extractive infrastructure is adopted and utilized for the subsistence and support of other human and more-than-human relations in local and Indigenous communities. Based on materials from interviews and observations with Evenki communities in Eastern Siberia in 2013–2021, the authors discuss the complex relations and sustainability issues entangled around infrastructure objects’ creation, use, maintenance, and transformations. The results demonstrate a wide variety of relations between obshchinas (non-governmental organizations of Indigenous peoples) and extractive companies constructed with infrastructure development of the latter. The paper discusses the shortcomings of the top-down approach in infrastructure planning and the need for contextualization and meaningful engagement with affected communities, some examples of which have already taken place in specific locales. The study concludes by calling for the support of environmentally and socially just infrastructure defined by Indigenous people and local communities as a way to increase sustainability. 

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2. Tokma and Vershina Khandy Villages’ Informal Road Networks, Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, 2019-2023

   https://doi.org/10.18739/A20C4SM6Z  

   Kuklina, Vera (May 2024, NSF Arctic Data Center)

   Hydrocarbon and timber industries are rapidly developing informal road networks in Siberian boreal forests, or taiga. Informal roads are undocumented, often unpaved roads, not maintained by governments, inclusive of local trails to wide industrial easements. Remote communities use informal roads for subsistence hunting, foraging, inter-community and market access. These two shapefiles delineate the modern extent of informal roads surrounding Indigenous Evenki villages of Tokma and Vershina Khandy in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. These informal road networks were mapped based on interviews and mobile ethnographies that informed a student-run crowdsourced mapping event, or “mapathon,” to digitize the roads from high-resolution 2010s Worldview satellite imagery. 

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3. Taiga Landscape Degradation Evidenced by Indigenous Observations and Remote Sensing

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su15031751  

   Morozova, Arina O.; Nyland, Kelsey E.; Kuklina, Vera V. (February 2023, Sustainability)

   Siberian taiga is subject to intensive logging and natural resource exploitation, which promote the proliferation of informal roads: trails and unsurfaced service roads neither recognized nor maintained by the government. While transportation development can improve connectivity between communities and urban centers, new roads also interfere with Indigenous subsistence activities. This study quantifies Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) in Irkutsk Oblast, northwest of Lake Baikal. Observations from LCLUC are used in spatial autocorrelation analysis with roads to identify and examine major drivers of transformations of social–ecological–technological systems. Spatial analysis results are informed by interviews with local residents and Indigenous Evenki, local development history, and modern industrial and political actors. A comparison of relative changes observed within and outside Evenki-administered lands (obshchina) was also conducted. The results illustrate: (1) the most persistent LCLUC is related to change from coniferous to peatland (over 4% of decadal change); however, during the last decade, extractive and infrastructure development have become the major driver of change leading to conversion of 10% of coniferous forest into barren land; (2) anthropogenic-driven LCLUC in the area outside obshchina lands was three times higher than within during the980s and 1990s and more than 1.5 times higher during the following decades. 

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4. Investigating Land Use Changes with Development of the Informal Road Networks: Case-Study in Siberia

   Kuklina, V.; Petrov, A. N.; Shiklomanov, N. I.; Yu, Q.; Bogdanov, V. (December 2019, American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2019)

   null (Ed.)

   While researchers of social-ecological systems acknowledge existence of formal and informal institutions affecting social-ecological governance, the role of informal sector in the land use change remains understudied. Moreover, existing studies of informal land use are focused mostly on urban areas, such as informal settlements. We argue that the remote regions would be another important area for inquiries. Informal, e.g. unobserved by official records, land use changes there are related to high-speed dynamics of resource extraction projects and location mostly in the regions of traditional land use practices of indigenous people. In particular, we focus on informal roads, which in the Arctic and Subarctic remote regions often remain understudied due to their small size, chaotic, temporal or even seasonal nature, private ownership or traditional subsistence functions. Despite their absence on official maps, they have significant social, economic and environmental impact on local, predominantly indigenous, communities. The study area: the north of Irkutsk region and Republic of Buryatia that the last decades has undergone rapid changes of traditional way of life of "old settlers", native Buryats and Evenks, collapse of the Soviet economy, development of oil and gas extractive industries and infrastructure, environmental regulations to protect the Lake Baikal and tourism development. The data was obtained in 2016-2018 at the municipal and local levels using interviews, observations, statistics and cartographic tools. As a result, we identified formal and informal elements of transportation infrastructure with common set of characteristics (e.g. time of development; purpose; present conditions; changes in location; use) and distinguished the specifics of their maintenance requirements, the forms of ownership, seasonality and local traditions. The future plans to use remotely-sensed data, coordinated visual mapping sessions, and field studies for understanding land use changes due to development of informal road networks will be discussed in the presentation. 

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5. Assessing vulnerability of subsistence travel to effects of environmental change in Interior Alaska

   https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11426-250120  

   Cold, H.S. (March 2020, Ecology and society)

   null (Ed.)

   Amplified climate warming at high northern latitudes is challenging societies that depend on local provisional and cultural ecosystem services, e.g., subsistence resources, for their livelihoods. Previous qualitative research suggests that climate-induced changes in environmental conditions are affecting rural residents’ ability to travel across the land and access local resources, but detailed information on the nature and effect of specific conditions is lacking. Our objectives were to identify climate-related environmental conditions affecting subsistence travel and access, and then estimate rural resident travel and access vulnerability to those environmental conditions. We collaborated with nine Interior Alaskan communities within the Yukon River basin and provided residents with camera equipped GPS units to document environmental conditions directly affecting subsistence access for 12 consecutive months. We also conducted comprehensive interviews with research participants to incorporate the effects of environmental conditions not documented with GPS units. Environmental conditions reported by rural residents were categorized into seven condition types. We assessed vulnerability to each condition by accounting for both likelihood (number of times a condition was documented) and sensitivity (magnitude of the effect from the condition) information derived from GPS observations and interviews. We also tested for differences in mean vulnerability values among environmental conditions and between community types (road-connected vs. remote) using a oneway analysis of variance. Rural community travel and access were most vulnerable to changes in ice conditions, erosion, vegetative community composition, and water levels. Environmental conditions that impeded natural travel corridors, e.g., waterways, more strongly influenced remote communities than those connected by roads. Increased vulnerability to environmental change puts remote communities at increased risk for food-security issues. Our study used a novel community-based approach to integrate local knowledge with scientific analysis to document and estimate the relative effects that specific environmental conditions are having on access to subsistence resources across Interior Alaska. 

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