| Summary: | Lapland is Finland’s northernmost region, a sparsely populated area bordering Sweden, Norway, Russia, and the Baltic Sea. Lapland covers 30% of the Finnish land mass but has only about 3% (about 180,000 people) of the total population of about 5.4 million people. Distances are long; for example, from Simo, the southernmost municipality of Lapland on the shore of the Bay of Bothnia, to Nuorgam in Utsjoki, at the top of Finland, is more than 500 kilometres. The area of Lapland, 100,366 square kilometres, is almost onethird of Finland’s total area. About 175,000 people live in Lapland. The region hosts Finnish people, Indigenous Sámi people and other cultural minorities. The history of the region is shadowed by colonialism. Many so-called ‘megatrends’ (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2011, 2018) take place in Lapland as well as elsewhere in the Arctic region. Climate change, globalisation, urbanisation, unemployment, and shifting demographics influence people’s lives and cause challenges in the social, cultural, and economic settings and post-colonial situation of the area.
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