About Karina Benessaiah

Karina was born in Athens, Greece before being whisked away to West Africa by her parents. In quest for new adventures, she decided to head out to the great north in Quebec, Canada for her undergraduate (in environment and development) and then her master’s (in Geography). She moved to the Phoenix area in 2009 in parts to pursue her PhD in Geography and in parts to experience another climate extreme: from cold to hot. Karina seeks to understand how people adapt to rapid climatic, environmental and socio-economic changes, and how those intertwine from the local to the global, with the explicit aim to identify and support the move from maladaptive to adaptive pathways. She explored human-environment interactions in coastal area in North America, Central America and now Europe. In the Phoenix Transect Project she was fortunate to collaborate on two small projects. The first, in collaboration with Jason Roehner, aims to examine the myriads of resource-based activities that were created in a town that is a southwestern crossroads- Gila Bend- throughout time and the second, in collaboration with Sean Deckert, examines the ways that heat is experienced in the wider Phoenix area.

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