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Mongolia’s northernmost province, Khövsgöl Aimag, famous for its massive Lake Khövsgöl set among the mountainous steppe, taiga, and tundra forests, increasingly attracts both domestic and international tourists. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Mongolia received over 500,000 tourists annually. The aimag is also home to Indigenous, nomadic Dukha reindeer herders and semi-nomadic Darkhad cattle herders. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this study uses an analytical hierarchy process to map areas in Khövsgöl Aimag, where the infrastructure, including buildings, dwellings, formal and informal roads, and pastureland, is subject to geohazards. The hazards of interest to this mapping analysis include mass wasting, flooding, and permafrost thawing, which threaten roads, pastures, houses, and other community infrastructure in Khövsgöl Aimag. Based on the integrated infrastructure risk map, an estimated 23% of the aimag is at high to very high risk for localized geohazards. After a discussion of the results informed by the interviews, mobile ethnographies, and local and national land use policies, we postulate that communities exercising more traditional nomadic lifestyles with higher mobility are more resilient to these primarily localized geohazards. 

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. 

In this paper we propose to discuss the issues of a chain reaction caused by the development of different types of transport infrastructure. The issues of infrastructural projects impact on local communities have long been widely discussed by social researchers. However, the northern and Arctic regions remain less studied in this regard while the situation there is more complex, especially at the intersections of various types of transport infrastructure. The problems of interaction between different kinds of infrastructure are especially manifested in the regions of extractive development, such as the north of the Irkutsk Region and the Republic of Buryatia. The materials for the analysis were obtained as a result of field studies in the north of the Irkutsk Region and the Republic of Buryatia in 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020, as well as on the basis of the analysis of satellite data and maps of the regional infrastructure development. The construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline and later oil and gas pipelines became an impetus for the development of other types of infrastructure, not only in the oil and gas extractive activities but also in logging. However, limited access to the pipeline and oil service roads has caused conflicts between the industrial companies and the local population. Local hunting trails are at the lowest level in such a hierarchy and are often destroyed and blocked by infrastructure development. A deeper and more detailed analysis of the social consequences of infrastructural development contributes to an understanding of the hierarchies of power that exist in Russia. 

Addressing the need for convergence of different sources of knowledge to deal with complex issues such as global change, this paper presents the results of collaboration between artists and scientists to study social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). We focus on informal roads as an example of SETS. In the absence of public roads local, mostly indigenous communities and others use these forestry roads, seismic line clearings and oil and gas service roads for mobility in Siberian taiga affected by extractive industry. In 2020, with COVID-19, we had to increase our emphasis on virtual forms of data gathering, interpretation, and representations of the results. Presented in this paper forms of transmedia storytelling are designed to allow audience and users as well as the local and indigenous communities to get familiar with the research results, give feedback, and provide their own perspectives, interrelations and interdependencies between different SETS components. 

On example of the city of Nadym, located in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area, the authors consider the socio-ecological problems of the development of green, blue and white open urban spaces. The research approach presented in the article is based on the study of a multifaceted complex of urban social and natural systems in their integrated unity, not just as public places, but as biomes — highly integrated urban ecosystems. A posteriori the researchers based on the materials of interviews conducted in 2020 with experts who in different years took part in the study or planned the development of the open urban spaces in Nadym, as well as on the analysis of available publications on this topic and publicly available data. The study found that factors such as the short summer, during which many residents leave the city, as well as the prevalence of freezing temperatures for almost eight months, in fact, transform the green and blue spaces of Nadym into white. This situation indicates the advisability of a more active appeal to the concept of a “winter city” in the development of the city urban environment. The application of the concept principles can be in demand in the process of creating more comfortable living conditions and spatial mobility of the Nadym residents, as well as for developing the recreational opportunities of the city open spaces and integrating them into the natural environment surrounding the city, which in general can be considered as one of the factors for the sustainable development of the city and the formation of post-industrial features in its socio-economic life.