Vanessa Cardamone

Vanessa is a PlanAdapt Fellow, based in France, originally from Italy.

Vanessa has worked for more than 18 years in disaster risk management across protracted crises and fragile, conflict-affected settings. Her expertise includes preparedness and contingency planning, emergency response (food security and livelihoods, WASH, shelter, protection, and inclusion), climate change adaptation, and inclusive and just resilience building. Her background spans programme management, strategy development, capacity sharing, advocacy, fundraising, and research.

Since 2022, Vanessa has worked as an independent consultant with ACAPS and NRC. Her services include risk and anticipatory analysis, climate services (agro-meteorological early warning, seasonal forecast for anticipatory action), advisory support on climate and environmental analysis (including research, partnerships, and fundraising), and designing and implementing capacity strengthening and training programs on climate risk and vulnerability analysis for anticipatory action, response planning, and resilience building.

Vanessa’s research work encompasses leading multi-stakeholder assessments and qualitative research initiatives addressing interconnected climate-conflict risks and vulnerabilities linked to gender, age, disability, and socio-economic injustice. Recent work included leading a climate displacement report on the impact of climate shocks on return/integration to inform durable solutions strategies in Afghanistan, supporting the Afghanistan Protection Cluster to integrate climate analysis into protection risk monitoring, and facilitating multi-stakeholder climate risk exercises. Vanessa also oversees ACAP’s global ENSO analysis and is a member of the IASC ENSO cell.

Between 2017 and 2022, Vanessa led Humanity & Inclusion’s emergency preparedness unit, where she developed the first organisation’s emergency preparedness strategy, along with several tools and processes, building capacity in over 18 country offices for risk analysis, contingency planning, and emergency response (Ready for Action Project). As part of her role, she also deployed to Kenya, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Lebanon to scale up response operations and train program team members and parters.

Between 2012 and 2016 she served with the UN World Food Programme, Oxfam and Solidarités International, leading emergency response, disaster risk reduction, livelihood resilience and climate change adaptation programmes in Bangladesh, Lebanon and Laos.

Previously, she served with the UN World Food Programme on early warning, climate policy, and disaster risk reduction in Ethiopia and at HQ. Her climate work with WFP focused on piloting, monitoring, and evaluating disaster risk management and livelihood protection programmes. These included risk finance mechanisms such as weather insurance schemes and early warning for livelihood safety nets, like the LEAP project, in coordination with academia and national authorities.

Vanessa is an experienced training and workshop facilitator. She has developed and delivered a wide range of adult learning materials, including online, blended, and peer-to-peer methods, targeted at national and international actors, often in challenging or resource-limited settings.

In addition to multi-risk analysis, Vanessa brings strong expertise in other foresight methods, including facilitating scenario-building exercises using variable-mapping techniques.

Committed to principled action, trust-based collaboration and localisation, Vanessa’s leadership experience includes guiding teams through organizational change, designing strategies, improving systems and processes, and securing funding through successful fundraising and strategic partnerships.

Vanessa holds a BA in Political Science (International Relations), a Master’s degree in Development and Environmental Economics from Roma Tre University and specialised in urban disaster risk reduction at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS). Vanessa is fluent in English and French.

For more info, see Vanessa’s LinkedIn profile.