Tourists visit the Santa Claus Village during a rainy day, on November 16, 2024, near Rovaniemi, Finnish Lapland. With a month to go until Christmas, Santa Claus is busy preparing, but the warming climate and lack of snow in his Arctic hometown have him worried.
| Photo Credit: AFP

With a month to go until Christmas, Santa Claus is busy preparing, but the warming climate and lack of snow in his Arctic hometown have him worried. By this time of year, the town of Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland — marketed by tourism officials since the 1980s as the “real” home of Santa Claus — should be white and pretty.

But on a recent visit, rain poured down from a gloomy slate sky and the temperature was well above freezing, with the thermometer showing 2C.

“My reindeer can fly, so that is no problem,” said the man in the red suit and long white beard, resting his weary legs after a long day of meeting excited children and adults. But “we can see that climate change is real. And it is affecting the reindeer. It is affecting life here in the Arctic,” added the man, whose employers declined to identify him by his real name.

Herders say milder and more unpredictable winters have left reindeer struggling to dig up their main food, lichen. Snow and ice have melted and refrozen, burying it under layers of packed ice.

The Arctic is warming faster than other parts of the world due to climate change — nearly four times as fast, according to research published by Finland-based scientists in the journal Nature in 2022.