The Skolt Sámi are rewilding the Näätämö River to protect their way of life

Linking the boreal forests of Finland with Norway’s Arctic fjords, the River Näätämö eddies through a fast-changing landscape. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, and Atlantic salmon are vanishing from its shores.

The Näätämö has historically been rich in salmon, trout, grayling and a variety of whitefish, which spawn in the deep lakes and shale banks of its catchment and grow to adulthood in its meanders shaded by birch, spruce and pine. These fish populations – and the ecosystem that sustains them – represent one of Europe’s last areas of relatively intact wilderness. The Näätämö also sustains the Skolt Sámi, an Indigenous people who have lived in Europe’s far north for more than 10 millennia. While the Sámi are widely associated with reindeer herding, the existence of many communities is interwoven with the great salmon migrations of the North Atlantic. 

The past half century has brought significant change to the Näätämö catchment. The region is on the forefront of the climate crisis, with warming waters and increased pollution disrupting the patterns of nature around which Sámi life has evolved. Salmon in the river have become smaller both in number and in size, and other fish populations have declined. This has been compounded by local industry, which has altered the very shape and flow of the river.

In the face of this, the Skolt Sámi are acting to protect the Näätämö and their way of life. In conjunction with Snowchange, a co-operative that works with Arctic Indigenous communities on the interconnecting issues of biodiversity, cultural tradition and climate change, they have begun to rewild the Näätämö, using Sámi knowledge to restore the river with a rare degree of fealty to its recent past.

“It’s a huge system under change,” says Snowchange founder Tero Mustonen, a Finnish environmentalist. Of all the species in the area, “the salmon itself is in big trouble,” he continues. “A relatively stable system for the past 8,000 years is now facing a kind of regime shift.”

In 1972, Finland’s parks and wildlife agency dredged parts of the river to make it easier to extract timber from the remote boreal forest. This action destroyed fish spawning grounds and prevented water from being retained in the catchment, leading to late-summer droughts. Road building around the region’s Lake Sevettijärvi led to pollution and shoreline erosion; as a consequence, the lake’s whitefish began to develop new parasites and diseases. 

While Finnish environmental agencies continued to call the region a pristine wilderness, Indigenous communities were being confronted with a degrading ecosystem, with profound consequences for their way of life.  

Sámi women felt the changes particularly keenly. 

“Women are more sensitive to receiving messages from their home environments,” says Pauliina Feodoroff, former president of the Skolt Sámi Association. “Thus, Indigenous conservation work ends up being no longer a choice but a bodily commitment.” 

Concerned by the steep decline in Atlantic salmon, the Skolt Sámi developed a community-based climate adaption plan in 2009. Indigenous knowledge had often been dismissed by Finnish conservationists, but dialogue between community leaders such as Feodoroff and Snowchange resulted in a co-management plan for the Näätämö catchment – the first Finnish conservation initiative built on the twin pillars of scientific assessment and Indigenous knowledge.

It was a groundbreaking moment in Finland, a country where the Sámi remain broadly disenfranchised from the conservation and development decisions that affect them more than anyone else. Unlike previous conservation initiatives, in this case, the Skolt Sámi would define what success looked like.

In 2015, the Sámi and Snowchange moved beyond monitoring and management and began  to actively rewild Näätämö. The first steps focused on aquatic restoration: they recreated the shale banks that trout, salmon and grayling need to spawn and rebuilt the banks of Lake Sevettijärvi, limiting further pollution and erosion from the road.

In less than 10 years, around six miles of vital spawning habitat has been restored in the catchment, and the old hydrological flow – altered for timber floating – is starting to return. This means that water stays for longer, reducing the risk of drought. They’ve achieved this by “rewiggling” parts of the river and restoring boulders that were removed in the early 1970s.

“Sámi knowledge has been quite instrumental” to the process, Mustonen says.

While nobody denies the importance of rigorous science for nature restoration, in a big system such as the Näätämö, knowledge based on Western-style research cannot necessarily answer where and in what order actions should be taken, he explains. But the elders could remember the precise places where boulders once impeded the river, slowing its discharge into the fjord. Sámi insight also allowed scientists to pinpoint where spawning grounds once existed. 

The rewilding has now expanded into the forests and peatlands that make up the wider catchment. This has involved purchasing areas of old-growth pine and birch forest to prevent the encroachment of industry, and there are plans to restore decaying timber to the forest floor to help regenerate the woods through natural succession, with minimal human intervention.

As the river system’s waters get warmer, woodland shade helps maintain the cool eddies that juvenile fish need to survive, while healthy peat bogs prevent minerals including lead and mercury from leaking into the water system. This holistic approach is proving beneficial for a range of species such as brown trout, which are once again breeding in the restored areas.

Of course, the catchment is still part of a politically complex, rapidly changing and interconnected Arctic world that acts as a sink for pollutants. 

Starting in 2018, new algae beds 40 centimetres thick and 10 metres wide have appeared in slow-moving parts of the river system. Developments like this, along with observable plastic pollution in the lower reaches of the Näätämö, led Sámi leaders to begin wondering about microplastics.

Snowchange started monitoring at locations identified in Sámi observations in 2020. The study revealed six different types of microplastic in the catchment – in concerningly high numbers. 

As an oligotrophic river system, the Näätämö is naturally low in nutrients. Yet as the waters warm and pollutants seep into the catchment, algae is spreading, clogging up the shale banks that the fish need to spawn. Microplastics in particular create a surface for algae to grow on, while harming the plankton that naturally feeds upon it and helps keep it in check.

As with the warming climate and crashing salmon stocks, this is an issue that cannot be tackled only at a local level; it requires urgent international action. But that isn’t stopping the Sámi from doing what they can. “The Sámi are asking themselves as a society how they can limit the proliferation of microplastics from their own use, such as fishing nets and vehicle tires,” Mustonen says. 

In a biome besieged by climate change, the steps taken by the Sámi and the co-management of the Näätämö stand as a beacon of hope. 

As Pauliina Feodoroff puts it, “Indigenous waters and lands strive to be well and prosper like our human communities.” In Näätämö, Mustonen says, the steps taken by the Sámi to protect their natural prosperity stand out. “Instead of empty talk, they have actually created visible and positive change on the ground.”