Tundra Warming and Access to Primary Care Services by the Native Reindeer Herders in the Russian Arctic

Arctic ecosystems are highly susceptible to rise in surface temperatures. In tundra, these impacts are amplified due fragility of the local socio-ecological relationships. The native circumpolar peoples are tightly integrated within the tundra ecosystems and therefore may be directly and adversely affected by such impacts. The migratory Nenets herders in Western Siberia experience decline of the traditional sources of livelihood from the reindeer due to recent fall in the reindeer populations. Simultaneously, they face new obstacles in access to primary health care. We study the change in access to the primary health care services by the reindeer herders. The herders annually travel long distances across the tundra from the summer camps near the reindeer pastures on the Arctic coast to the villages in the interior, where they winter. Such journey is only possible for the herders when a firm snow cover is present. One consequence of the recent warming is a later annual arrival of the snows in the fall, followed by an earlier spring thaws. This shift causes the herders to prolong their stay in tundra camps and to leave from the villages back to the camps earlier, before the thaw. As a result, the migrant herder families have less access the primary care at the clinics. Utilizing longitudinal data analysis for 1995-2010, we report on findings of the relationship between the shift in surface temperatures in the region, access and utilization of stationary village clinics for primary care as well as frequency of emergency medical care in tundra.