The Sámi forest of Alttokangas, 72 ha in size, is located in the municipality of Inari and is the first ICCA (Indigenous and Community Conserved Area) in the Sámi Home Area. ICCAs are protected by Indigenous Peoples and/or local communities themselves and contain important biodiversity. ICCAs can be found across the world. Now a new StoryMaps summarizes the conservation and restoration efforts in this first-ever ICCA for the Sámi in Finland.
The Sámi forest of Alttokangas was approved as an ICCA in 2024. In 2023 Finnish NGO Snowchange Cooperative got funding from the The Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation for a project titled: Snowchange Arctic Rewilding: Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge Rewilding of Boreal Forests in Finland.
In consultation with the local Sámi Alttokangas was chosen as one of the project sites. To-date the participating Sámi and Snowchange researchers are finding their integrated approach to conserving and restoring Alttokangas to be a meaningful new method.
In 2023 questions about the conservation status of Alttokangas emerged. What mechanism could both protect the forest and safeguard Sámi rights, land-use and their role in protecting the biodiversity of the area. The Sámi families involved want to protect Alttokangas forest in a way that includes the traditional Sámi knowledge, land-use, history and observations.
As part of the cooperation in Alttokangas ecological restoration activities have started in the forest. Here we discuss the two major activities so far – fencing off small plots of land to monitor vegetation recovery, and a prescribed burn.
In just two years the project has achieved the establishment of the first ICCA site in the Sámi Home Area, launched a comprehensive ecological inventory and monitoring practice, and kick-started the practical restoration of this important Sámi site.
We share messages from this work in a new StoryMap in Sámi, Finnish, Swedish and English to advance the understanding of Sámi-led conservation and restoration in the European North.
