Paola Vesco (PhD, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, 2020) is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).  Her expertise includes climate security, artificial intelligence, and armed conflict predictions.

Paola's research focuses on the analysis and forecasting of armed conflict and its societal impacts, particularly how conflict affects socioeconomic development and how these dynamics interact with climate-related risks.

Paola is currently a member of the POLIMPACT project, where she develops projections of future political conditions and examines how they shape societal vulnerability to climate change. She is also a researcher and former Deputy Director of the Violence and Impacts Early Warning System (VIEWS), which leverages Artificial Intelligence and open-source data to produce forecasts of armed conflict globally.

Paola's research has been published in high-impact general and field journals, including Nature Communications, World Development, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Peace Research.

Before joining PRIO, she was a researcher at Uppsala University, where she led the vulnerability work package in the Society at Risk project. She has contributed to policy reports for FAO, UNHCR, UN OCHA, and the World Bank.