Feb. 14: Omar Tesdell – Land-Based Research and Climate Adaptation in Palestine

Climate crisis has not received considerable attention in Palestine amidst seemingly more pressing matters. Dr. Tesdell explores how techniques of agroecological adaptation have enabled Palestinian communities to persist under various forms of duress. His paper explores some adaptations, especially with tree and grain crops, as well as the unique land-based research methods used to investigate them. Both the technical aspects of agroecological adaptation and the ongoing research methods may hold insights for land-based research in other communities around the world.

Omar Imseeh Tesdell is associate professor in the Department of Geography at Birzeit University in Palestine and studies landscape and agroecological transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean.

His peer-reviewed research has been published in refereed journals such as: Plants, People, Planet (2020), Frontiers in Plant Science (2020), Journal of Arid Environments (2020), Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (2019), Geoforum (2017), and International Journal of Middle East Studies (2015).

He has also published with a team, in Arabic, an article on the Makaneyyat group’s methodology (2022). He has edited an Arabic-English guide entitled Palestinian Wild Food Plants, 2018 (CC licensed e-book) as part of a community-based research collective. Other recent publications include “Garden Gathering” in A Garden Among the Hills: The Floral Heritage of Palestine, The Palestinian Museum (2019). He holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Sustainable Agriculture from the University of Minnesota and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University in New York in 2015.