Veronica Maria Casartelli is an Environmental engineer with a PhD in Urban policies and planning and a Master in Geopolitics and global security. After a short experience in the private sector, she became an officer of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers – Italian Civil Protection Department (since 2005). She is an expert in the field of disaster risk management, with a special focus on flood risk management and multi-hazard early warning systems implementation.

She has participated in several European programmes and projects and in the management of recent disasters at the national level. She has been part of the European Expert Working Group on Disaster Loss and Damage and on Risk assessment and mapping for disaster risk management.

Fully trained in the framework of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism, she is now a lecturer of the Disaster Risk Management module in Introduction Courses on a regular basis. She has been deployed abroad and participated as a peer in the UCPM Peer review in Georgia. She was seconded at the Civil Protection, Security and Local Police Directorate of Veneto Region from 2018 to 2022, focusing on the implementation of regional disaster risk reduction strategies and the development of the Regional sustainable development strategy. She is a senior research fellow at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) within the Risk Assessment and Adaptation Strategies Division since July 2019, working on the interactions between Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation; governance of climate risks, science for policy; and risk management capabilities assessments. Recently, she has been holding lectures on Disaster risk reduction at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies and on disaster risk management as a Temporary Professor at the University of Verona.