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 2025
Taught by Noam Weiss & Dr. Elli Groner
The course includes three spheres: terrestrial marine, and air. It starts with an introduction to deserts of the world and why deserts are considered hazards for life. The course then covers adaptations to the hazards of deserts, the desert food web and ecosystem, and human-nature interactions including ecosystem services and desert management. The Arava is located on a globally important bird migration flyway, and the course will study bird migration, birds as an asset to human life in the desert, and how to protect it. The course also covers the Red Sea and the coral reef ecosystem.
Taught by Dr. Rina Kedem & Dr. Suleiman Halasah
Transboundary Environmental Cooperation (TEC) refers to 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 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: its premises, case studies, challenges, and opportunities. The course will discuss the environment-conflict-cooperation nexus and delineate the impact of global climate change on environmental cooperation and conflict and vice versa.
Taught by Dr. Clive Lipchin
The goal of this course is to introduce students to the policy options for addressing environmental challenges at the local, national, regional, and global scale. The course considers how environmental problems are defined as a product of both social and environmental conditions, and then explores the ‘tool box‘ of policy types, their applications, strengths, and weaknesses. Various case studies from the Middle East are used to deepen understanding.
Taught by Dr. David Lehrer
Conflict over natural resources is often described as the defining feature of our age. As global demand for energy, consumer goods, and high-tech increases, geopolitical contests intensify. Technological development continues to change the definition of resources, the nature of conflicts, and the way resources are valued, extracted, exchanged, and controlled across the globe. This course equips students with tools to understand the relationship between conflict, natural resources, and the effects of this relationship on development, peace, and security.
Taught by Dr. Aviva Peeters
This 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 is also beneficial for those who have taken a course before. The course focuses on the use of GIS for scientific inquiry and real-world problem-solving, covering different types of GIS spatial analysis such as suitability analysis, surface analysis, and 3D analysis.
Taught by Dr. Elise Machline
This multidisciplinary course explores the severe impacts of climate change in the MENA region, which is warming faster than the global average. Focusing on arid areas, it examines environmental and social challenges such as drought, heat, and biodiversity loss. Taught by experts from various fields, the course combines readings, discussions, field trips, and a final team project to develop a real-world climate change plan. Students will engage critically with regional climate issues and learn tools for adaptation and mitigation.
Plants and pollinators have co-evolved for nearly 200 million years, resulting in the diversity of flowering plants and pollinating animals we see today. However, the stability of plant-pollinator interactions is rapidly being undermined by climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and agrochemicals. Considering that nearly 80% of the food we consume relies on pollination services, there is an urgent need to understand these interactions and explore approaches for plant-pollinator conservation and sustainability.
Taught by Dr. Miri Lavi-Neeman
Political Ecology has emerged as a powerful interdisciplinary critique of ecological change, mapping political, economic, and social factors onto questions of environmental degradation and transformation. This course introduces core tenets and perspectives of political ecology, key debates in the field, and 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.
Spring 2026
more information coming soon
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 & Dr. Uri Shanas
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 Oranim Academic College.
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. 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 Middle East (including a perspective on the recent Abraham Accords).
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. Shimrit Maman
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.
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.