This is the kind of school I always wanted to go to. It is a group of scholars in the classical sense of the word and I’ve met people who I hope to be friends with for the rest of my life.
Students take a course load of 4-5 academic courses per semester. Courses focus on the areas of water management, renewable energy, ecology, sustainable agriculture, environmental politics, and more. Courses are offered at an undergraduate level, with some graduate courses available. Each course is for 3 academic credits.
*All details are subject to change.
Fall 2024
Taught by Noam Weiss (course coordinator), Dr. Elli Groner, Dr. Omer Polak
This course will present an overview of the ecology of the Arava desert. In this course,
both basic principles of ecology followed by desert ecology will be introduced.
Students will learn about desert food webs, the interaction between ecosystems,
pollution and other risks to the conservation of the Arava.
Students will study the link between the Arava ecosystems; they will study about
plants, arthropods, mammals and birds of the terrestrial ecosystem and the principles
and wildlife of the sea. While learning about different ecosystem and taxon students
will study the anthropogenic impact on wildlife.
Taught by Dr. Rina Kedem & Dr. Suleiman Halasah
Transboundary Environmental Cooperation (TEC) refers to the process of working across national borders to address environmental issues that affect more than one country/sovereign entity. There is a growing literature on TEC and its potential peace-enhancing effects in post-conflict settings and post-conflict natural resource management. This field is called Environmental Peacebuilding (EPB) . The course will explore the theory and application of the young and fast-growing field of EPB (especially in light of global climate change), its premises, case studies, challenges, and opportunities. The course will discuss the environment-conflict-cooperation and climate change nexus, and delineate the impact of global climate change on environmental cooperation and conflict and vice versa. Students will understand the complexities of environmental cooperation. It will aim to develop critical thinking and analysis of the field and its applications, to expose students to the world leaders and organizations in the field of EPB and to advance their academic skills by including analyses of theories and comparison case studies.
Taught by Dr. David Lehrer
In a time of multiple environmental and political crises, it is especially important to understand how global resource geopolitics shape our lives in ways big and small. This introductory course equips students with the tools they need to understand the relationship between conflict, natural resources, and the effects of this relationship on development, peace, and security.
The course is divided into three parts:
Part I familiarizes students with key concepts in global resource geopolitics and examines the historical transformations that led to our present moment of global conflict, climate crisis, and widespread predictions of resource exhaustion. Part II examines the key concepts behind fears of resource scarcity, namely the environment, natural resources, and thresholds.
Part III examines key cases and governance approaches to global resource geopolitics, looking in particular at conflict minerals, oil and gas and renewable alternatives.
Taught by Dr. Aviva Peeters
The course is an introduction to the concepts and application of geographic information systems and science (GIS). It is designed for students without former GIS experience, but students who have taken a course before can benefit from taking it. It focuses on the use of GIS for scientific inquiry and on its application for real-world problem solving. Different types of GIS spatial analysis are studied and applied such as suitability analysis, surface analysis and 3D analysis. Case studies from various environmental research domains are used as demonstrations. Each lesson comprises of a theoretical introduction and of an exercise. The exercises include training on the ArcGIS® Desktop software package.
Taught by Dr. Miri Lavi-Neeman
Political Ecology has emerged in the past two decades as a powerful interdisciplinary critique of ecological change. In short, Political Ecology is a way for mapping political, economic, and social factors onto questions of environmental degradation and transformation. It is a powerful way therefore to politicize, apolitical discussions of ecology and the environment; to undermine common sense understandings of “the environment” as separate from “the social”, and to bring humans and non-humans into discussions about conservation.
As a theoretical tool-kit and set of empirical case-studies, the field of Political Ecology is extremely broad and diverse. This course will provide an introduction to core tenets or perspectives of political ecology. It will introduce students to key debates in the field—such as the relationship between environment and violence, the critique of environmental determinisms and of Malthusian notions of scarcity and limits, the links between conservation, control and dispossession, and more. It also evaluates the power of political ecology to explain and analyze historical and current conflicts and processes involving Israelis, Palestinians, and others in the Middle East in the context of regional and broader processes such as climate change.
Using a combination of case studies and theoretical works, we will explore a range of environmental issues including: land, forestation, settlement, energy, and environmental movements. We will follow case studies and research in particular within Israel and the Palestine, but also from other parts of the world.
Taught by Dr. Danny Minahan
The course will explore the field of ecology, which is the study of interactions between organisms and their environment, specifically that of plant-pollinator interactions. These interactions will be examined through the lens of pollinator behavior to better understand the ecosystem services of food production and biodiversity conservation. The course will be divided into three sections: (a) A global perspective to understand the big- picture challenges facing pollinators, and the implications for food security. (b) The mechanisms that threaten pollinators, with an emphasis on pollinator behavior and pollination. (c) Examine the expected consequences of a warmer planet on pollinators and food production and consider the next steps towards preserving this invaluable ecosystem service.
Taught by Dr. Shimrit Maman and Dr. Sivan Isaacson
Remote Sensing is technology-enabled data collection from an area or object without direct physical contact. Various types of remote sensing make use of aerial photographs (nowadays mostly by UAVs), satellite images, and field spectroscopy.
This course aims to provide students with both remote sensing theory and practical applications using examples of environmental research and applications. The science and technology of remote sensing will be covered alongside hands-on measurements linking satellite, airborne, and field data.
This course is about wastewater treatment processes and technology, with an overview of the operation and maintenance of wastewater plants and different treatment processes. This course is intended to provide guidance and criteria for the design and selection of small-scale wastewater treatment plants. It provides both the information necessary to select, size, and design such wastewater treatment unit processes.
This subject will provide methods and technical issues related to integrated water services, treatment and reuse of water, with particular reference to urban areas, as well as an introduction to methods for the management and start-up of wastewater plants.
NON-ACADEMIC COURSES
Facilitated by Clara Maria Huergo
All students and interns participate in the Dialogue Forum, reflecting the Arava Institute’s mission to generate capacity-building for conciliation and cooperation, even during conflict. Dialogue Forum participants engage in weekly dialogue sessions overseen by three facilitators (Israeli, Palestinian, International). Together, they discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict including its historical roots, the current situation as experienced by both sides, and possible futures. They share personal experiences and family stories from different sides in the conflict, raising universal questions about identity, national ideologies, power and privilege, coexistence and personal responsibility. In this process, students are challenged to examine critically their own views, cultural values and understanding of history.
Every student, no matter the country of origin, has the opportunity to contribute significantly to this ongoing dialogue. By engaging with these issues in a multi-cultural group setting, Dialogue Forum participants develop competencies in intercultural understanding and empathy. The weekly dialogue sessions are enriched by guest speakers, films on the conflict, and an intensive mid-semester trip. Workshops on storytelling, active listening and other communication skills help students in the dialogue process, and contribute to developing respectful interactions within the student community.
The Dialogue Forum is not meant to lead to political agreement among the participants. In fact, the open dialogue reveals many ideological differences within the Conflict, as reflected by the students themselves. In the Dialogue Forum, we explore how to live within these differences, as individuals and groups. This builds on the Arava Institute’s belief that the social and political relationships within and between groups in this region have a significant influence on environmental practices, public policies, and grassroots activism. The Dialogue Forum takes advantage of the Arava Institute’s own community as a microcosm of the region, building the tools and understanding necessary to foster environmental sustainability, social justice and respect in the broader society.
Spring 2025
Taught by Dr. Tali Zohar
Modern society relies on stable, readily available energy supplies. Renewable energy is an increasingly important component of the new energy mix. The course covers the history, utilization, and storage of renewable technologies such as wind, solar, biomass, fuel cells, and hybrid systems. The course also touches upon the social, cultural, and environmental consequences of energy production and consumption, both renewable and fossil, the impact on climate change, and the transition towards a sustainable society.
Taught by Dr. Elli Groner
This course is aimed in providing students with the experience of doing field work and learning how to assess nature into meaningful results and discussion. The expedition of this course will be over 5 days together with 3rd year Biology students from Haifa University.
The aim of this course is to provide the students with a hands-on experience in
biodiversity. The world-wide sharp decline in biodiversity is a human made crisis that ecologists are trying to solve. Some of the important questions are: “What and how many species exist?”; “How do we evaluate the abundance and the richness of species?”; “How do we set priority regions for conservation based on biodiversity?” We will deal with these questions and others before, during and after sampling several taxonomic groups in the research area of the Arava institute. The students of this course will take part in a long-term monitoring research of a specific landscape unit in the Arava valley.
Taught by Dr. Miri Lavi-Neeman
This class we will examine how social scientists have adopted and/or interrogated a number of concepts and keywords relating to the contemporary global environmental change. Together, these keywords form a climate change general vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings that were developing, overlapping, changing and assimilating in the course of general societal discussion in the past 15 years. Among these concepts, the recent explosion of critical social science literature on “the Anthropocene” is the most prominent example of cross-disciplinary borrowing; further concepts such as resilience, adaptation, vulnerability and attribution are more recent keywords in the lexicons of political ecology and cognate fields.
Taught by Dr. Shimrit Maman
This introductory course aims to provide students with an integrated overview of the science of climate change through various aspects: physical and anthropogenic. The science of climate change will be presented, drawing attention to state of the art research and technologies. Diplomatic and policy efforts and trends will be discussed. And lastly, social changes, adaptation and activism issues that will be presented and analyzed.
Taught by Dr. Rina Kedem
The course examines theories, models, and examples of the conflict-cooperation
continuum in the political arena of the Middle East. The course includes an
interdisciplinary approach to development, geography, environment, and peace and conflict studies.
The course aims to:
- Review and analyze the formal and informal environmental relationship
between two countries while focusing on the Israeli- Palestinian environmental history and/or the Jordanian- Israeli environmental history of conflict and cooperation. - Study patterns and trends of cooperation and conflict. Which factors hinder
cooperation, and which induce conflict? - Analyze case studies with an emphasis on local case studies and the topics of
climate, water, energy, and biodiversity. - Provide a platform to discuss contemporary matters and anecdotes in the
environmental relationships between the countries in the Middel East (including a perspective on the recent Abraham Accords).
Taught by Dr. Elise Machline
With momentum building for an expansion of architectural and urban design practices that respond to the environmental challenges of our time, it is worth considering the socio-economic implications of what has come to be known around the world as sustainable urbanism. In this course, we bring together a series of topics aiming to address the socio-economic impacts of ‘green’ building policies focusing on Israel but through an international overview. In sum, this course aims to answer a crucial question: If sustainable urbanism does offer individual as well as societal benefits, can it be affordable to those who
need it the most?
More specifically, this course will focus on (i) the sustainable urbanism policies
implemented to prevent climate change; (ii) “green building policies and practices (iii) the socio-economic impacts of “green” building policies. (iiiiv) the analysis of case studies addressing sustainable urbanism.
Taught by Dr. David Lehrer
This course will survey economic thinking on environmental issues. A wide
range of topics will be considered, including economic approaches to pollution
control; the extent to which environmental regulations impede production of
conventional goods and services; water markets; valuation of environmental
resources; natural resource damage assessment; climate change; loss of
biodiversity; circular economies; and sustainability. The course will seek to
introduce students to the insights that economics can provide as well as make
them aware of the pitfalls of economic approaches.
Soils form a unique and irreplaceable essential resource for all terrestrial organisms, including man. Soils form not only the very thin outer skin of the earth’s crust that is exploited by plant roots for anchorage and supply of water and nutrients. Soils are complex natural bodies formed under the influence of plants, microorganisms and soil animals, water and air from their parent material, solid rock or unconsolidated sediments. Soil composition under variable conditions, usually differ strongly from the parent (parent = original) material, and normally are far more suitable as a rooting medium for plants. In addition to serving as a substrate for plant growth, including crops and pasture, soils play a dominant role in the cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen and other elements, influencing the composition and turnover rates of substances in the atmosphere and the hydrosphere.
The course will include laboratory and field work (soil sampling and field analysis), worksheets, exercises, readings, etc. In addition to participating in the lab and class discussions, students will have a midterm exam. The main reading of this course will be provided by the instructor.
Taught by Dr. Oren Hoffman
The course offers an overview of approaches to sustainable agriculture. In this course, farming methods and the agronomic and environmental consequences are explored through lectures and gardening. Subjects include crop diversity, ancient crops, organic vs. conventional management, water- saving techniques, soil ecology, and co-cropping. The students will have the opportunity to visit and help in the experimental fields while exploring various approaches towards agricultural sustainability. As they learn, they will document and share something they learned on social media (or present in class). The social media assignment offers the opportunity to engage with a wider audience, including friends and family, on the important topic of sustainable development. Aside from being an important skill, posting to social media enables access to more information and knowledge sources.
The students will be exposed to various research questions currently being studied in the Center for Sustainable Agriculture, revolving around resource conservation in desert agriculture. They will take part in setting up and running experiments in the student garden and/or the experimental fields of the CSA in Ketura. Their assignments will include hands on tasks and writing a report about the experiments. They will write and hand in parts of the report throughout the semester. The first part will be a short introduction/literature review (based on max 5 papers), the second part will include the students’ methodology and the final report will include the results and some discussion.
Taught by Dr. Clive Lipchin
This course will introduce the major issues hindering or allowing for efficient water management in the Middle East. As water scarcity is a reality in the region, it is critical to explore the ways and means for sustainable management of this resource in the face of growing demand and dwindling supply and the associated regional plans for water allocation among the countries of the region. The course will concentrate on the Jordan River and Dead Sea Basin and associated groundwater resources and how these waters are managed and shared. The course will focus on the water resources of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. The goal of the course is to provide students with an overview of the challenges facing policy makers and water experts in effectively managing these shared resources and negotiating over their equitable allocation.
NON-ACADEMIC COURSES
Facilitated by Clara Maria Huergo
All students and interns participate in the Dialogue Forum, reflecting the Arava Institute’s mission to generate capacity-building for conciliation and cooperation, even during conflict. Dialogue Forum participants engage in weekly dialogue sessions overseen by three facilitators (Israeli, Palestinian, International). Together, they discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict including its historical roots, the current situation as experienced by both sides, and possible futures. They share personal experiences and family stories from different sides in the conflict, raising universal questions about identity, national ideologies, power and privilege, coexistence and personal responsibility. In this process, students are challenged to examine critically their own views, cultural values and understanding of history.
Every student, no matter the country of origin, has the opportunity to contribute significantly to this ongoing dialogue. By engaging with these issues in a multi-cultural group setting, Dialogue Forum participants develop competencies in intercultural understanding and empathy. The weekly dialogue sessions are enriched by guest speakers, films on the conflict, and an intensive mid-semester trip. Workshops on storytelling, active listening and other communication skills help students in the dialogue process, and contribute to developing respectful interactions within the student community.
The Dialogue Forum is not meant to lead to political agreement among the participants. In fact, the open dialogue reveals many ideological differences within the Conflict, as reflected by the students themselves. In the Dialogue Forum, we explore how to live within these differences, as individuals and groups. This builds on the Arava Institute’s belief that the social and political relationships within and between groups in this region have a significant influence on environmental practices, public policies, and grassroots activism. The Dialogue Forum takes advantage of the Arava Institute’s own community as a microcosm of the region, building the tools and understanding necessary to foster environmental sustainability, social justice and respect in the broader society.
