Mordechai Shechter

Mordechai Shechter was born on 2 August 1937 in Tel Aviv, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. He was widely known by the nickname Moti. His family had deep roots in the country: according to a family history podcast about him, his ancestors arrived in the Land of Israel at the end of the 18th century as part of the Hasidic immigration, and his family story combined the history of the Old Yishuv with that of the Jews of the Pale of Settlement.

As a teenager he wanted to become a farmer, an ambition that took him to the Kadoorie Agricultural School. He then served in the Israel Defense Forces in the Nahal paratroopers.

He went on to study in the United States, first at UCLA and then at the University of Houston in Texas, where he received a Bachelor of Science in agricultural economics summa cum laude in 1964. He completed a doctorate in agricultural economics at Iowa State University in 1968.

Shechter joined the University of Haifa around 1970 and became a full professor in its Department of Economics, teaching environmental economics and planning, natural resource economics, health economics and public sector economics. In 1985 he founded the university's Natural Resources and Environmental Research Center, which for a period also had a branch at Tel-Hai College, and he directed it until 2010. He also founded the graduate Department of Natural Resource and Environmental Management and chaired it from 2005.

At Haifa he held many of the university's central posts. He was head of the Department of Economics, dean of research and chair of the senior faculty association, and he served as rector from 1994 to 1997. He also taught at the Technion, in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management and in urban and regional planning. Abroad he was a visiting scholar at Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C., and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and at agricultural universities in Copenhagen and the Netherlands. He was made an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

His research focused on putting an economic value on the environment, with work on contingent valuation, willingness to pay, externalities, water scarcity and climate change. By 2000 he had published two books and more than a hundred articles in Israeli and international journals, and he served on the editorial board and as a guest editor of the journal Environmental and Resource Economics. He was Israel's international representative in the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

From 2000 to 2005 he was president of Tel-Hai Academic College in the Upper Galilee, on leave from Haifa. In August 2010 the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, later Reichman University, appointed him founding dean of its School of Sustainability. The school, funded by Israel Corporation, Israel Chemicals and Oil Refineries, was accredited to offer a bachelor's degree in sustainability studies. Its funding by major industrial companies drew criticism from environmental reporters, while Shechter presented the companies' involvement as a sign that sustainability was here to stay.

He also held many public roles. He chaired the council of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the board of the Haifa Museums, sat on the executive board of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and the national board of the Council for a Beautiful Israel, and founded and headed the Israel Information Center for Climate Change Adaptation. He served on the Environment Ministry's expert committee on air quality standards, chaired the economics research committee of the Water Authority, sat on the steering committee of the Center for Environmental Policy at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, chaired the higher education forum of the Basha'ar association, and acted as an economic adviser to the environmental organisation Adam Teva V'Din.

Shechter spoke about his family history and his attachment to the land in a recorded family story titled Ben HaAretz (Son of the Land), produced by the Family Sounds podcast. It described his roots in the Old Yishuv, his love of the country and his concern for the future of the planet in the face of the climate crisis.

Details of his immediate family have not been reported in the sources available at the time of writing.

Mordechai Shechter died on 18 October 2026, aged 89. The cause and place of his death have not been made public.

On the same day the University of Haifa's Natural Resources and Environmental Research Center, which he had founded in 1985, marked his death under the title Our Loss and published his final interview, a conversation with Professor Ruslana (Rachel) Palatnik and Professor Ofira Ayalon about environmental economics research, its influence on policy and his own professional path. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time this page was written.

Shechter is regarded as one of the founders of environmental economics in Israel. The research center and the graduate department he established at the University of Haifa trained generations of researchers and professionals, and the School of Sustainability he led at Reichman University brought the subject into undergraduate education.

In June 2026 the steering committee of the Israeli Forum for Environmental Economics chose him for the Forum's first Lifetime Achievement Award, in recognition of his long contribution to developing and establishing the field in Israel, his academic and public work, and his part in training researchers, professionals and decision-makers. The award was presented at the Forum's first annual conference at Reichman University on 2 July 2026, a little over three months before his death.