This article examines the legal complexity concerning protection of traditional knowledge (TK) held by Indigenous Peoples. Despite the significance of this knowledge, particularly concerning environmental conservation, biodiversity management, bioresources, and ecosystem management in connection with the traditional lands on which Indigenous Peoples live, current legal frameworks fall short of offering a comprehensive protection regime respectful of key ethical principles that are central for Indigenous Peoples, mainly fairness, the right to culture, and Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination (IPRSD). To map the currently available solutions offered for protecting TK rights, this article primarily examines three legal regimes – intellectual property rights (IPR), human rights, and biodiversity – but also looks at some national solutions. However, none of these regimes per se offers a suitable solution, and each suffers from various shortcomings, as we demonstrate in detail. Yet if developed further, these regimes – along with some others – would indeed be suitable mechanisms for TK protection. Accordingly, this article suggests a principle-based approach to protecting and accessing TK that amalgamates the regime of human rights with the concepts of private property and exclusivity via mainstreaming values, such as fairness and the right to culture, associated with IPRSD holistically, and throughout multiple layers of legal decision-making.

Climate change represents a global challenge that impacts the environment, traditional lifestyle and health of the Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic zone of Western Siberia and threatens their food security. Reindeer are an important food source for this population since reindeer herding products are used as traditional nutrition and effective preventive means and remedies for adapting to the cold and geomagnetic activity in the High North. Longer off-season periods, high summer and winter temperatures, melting ice, and forest and tundra fires have a significant impact on the trampling and degradation of reindeer pastures. These effects may lead to massive reindeer losses and changes in the traditional diet of the Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic, which result in increases in the prevalence of respiratory diseases, overweight and hypertension. This study applied a multidisciplinary approach based on ecological and medical research methods with the inclusion of socioeconomic analysis. The primary sources included data on the longitudinal dynamics of air temperature as a climate change indicator and reindeer livestock populations (1936–2018), consumption of reindeer products and physiological impacts on the Yamal Indigenous population collected during expeditions to the Arctic zone of Western Siberia in 2012–2018.

This article presents the challenges facing reindeer herding as being both a profitable business and part of the traditional culture of the nomadic Indigenous peoples in the Arctic zone of Western Siberia which addresses substantial needs of the local population. Reindeer herding products are used as traditional nutrition, and as effective preventive means and remedies for adapting to the cold and geomagnetic activity in the High North. Export trends of traditional reindeer products have decreased local Indigenous peoples’ access to venison and had a negative impact on their health. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is especially urgent for the Indigenous peoples to have sufficient access to traditional food and be involved in policy decision-making to maintain this traditional business. We aim to analyze the dependencies of Indigenous peoples on the reindeer produce–exporting “food value chain” and explore how (1) the independence of reindeer herders could be increased in these export chains and (2) how provision of their products to local communities could be secured. The study takes a multidisciplinary approach based on policy and socioeconomic analyses with input from medical research. Primary sources include data collected from interviews and surveys of Indigenous peoples during expeditions to the Nyda settlement, the Nydinskaya tundra, the Tazovsky settlement, the Tazovskaya tundra, the Nakhodka tundra, the Gyda and Gydansky settlements, the Yavai-Salinskaya tundra, the Seyakha settlement, the Seyakhinskaya and Tambeyskaya tundras located along the southern coast of the Ob Bay, the northeast coast of the Yamal Peninsula, the Tazovsky and Gydansky Peninsulas, and the Shuryshkarsky district. Data were collected during the summers and winters of 2014–2020.

The field of Security Studies traditionally focused on military threats to states' survival, however, since the end of the Cold War the concept of security has widened and individuals and communities have gradually become viewed as appropriate referent objects of security: Multifaceted challenges facing communities at the sub-state level are increasingly regarded as security threats, including their potential to cause instability for the larger society, thus affecting states’ security. In the Arctic region, a central challenge is that inhabitants are exposed to multiple non-traditional and non-military threats resulting from environmental, economic, and societal changes, which can be understood as threats tohuman security. We argue that a comprehensive approach to human security overlaps with the concept ofsocietal security, and must therefore consider threats to collective identity and the essential conditions necessary for the maintenance and preservation of a distinct society. We see the human security framework as a suitable analytical tool to study the specific challenges that threaten the Arctic population, and in turn the well-being of Arctic societies. Therefore, we argue that utilising the concept of human security can promote societal security in the context of the Arctic, and in particular, its sub-regions, for example, the Barents region.

Overarching digitalisation is producing significant socio-cultural, economic and policy changes in the European High North. These changes create new opportunities, but also challenges and concerns for people and communities living in the region. Digital development is guided by supranational, national and regional digital policies and is secured through national cybersecurity agendas. These frameworks concentrate on advancing overall economic growth and safeguarding critical information infrastructure and information security, but pay inadequate attention to the interests, needs and fears of people and communities experiencing digitalisation in everyday life. In order to generate a more comprehensive cybersecurity agenda, which focuses on human security and empowering people to influence the digital development, a research framework highlighting the actual ways people use, wish to use, or are unable to use information and communication technologies is needed. The focus of this article is therefore on regionally contextualised digital opportunities and threats as they may be experienced by local people and communities. It utilises insights of securitisation theory to grant people a say in the direction of digital development in their region. The aim is to introduce issues of human security to cybersecurity agendas, for a more comprehensive understanding of the societal changes that digitalisation generates.