WAVEMAKERS PODCAST
Laura Canevari: Rebuilding Climate Resilience from the Ground Up
We’re diving in with Global List founder Laura Canevari of ITACA Solutions! Help us complete the global map: TOOL 2.000 Female Founders & Owners of Ocean & New Energy - Nominate today!
What if climate adaptation stopped being a top-down plan and became a community-powered practice?
On this episode of the Wavemakers Podcast, we dive into the powerful story of Laura Canevari, CEO and Founder of ITACA Solutions — a climate adaptation company helping coastal communities across the Caribbean, Central America, and Colombia build resilience on their own terms.
Laura’s journey is anything but linear. From marine science student in Australia to Oxford scholar, climate consultant, and founder, she has spent the last 15 years asking one urgent question:
How do we make climate adaptation actually work for the people living it?
Her answer became ITACA — short for Innovation, Training and Adaptation in Coastal Areas — a company built on the belief that resilience cannot be imported. It must be co-created with communities, grounded in local knowledge, and backed by systems that do more than produce another report. ITACA today works across expert consulting, project development, and education and training, with a focus on blue economy, food security, and nature-based solutions.
In this conversation, Laura speaks with honesty, clarity, and heart about what she has learned from working in the aftermath of hurricanes, rebuilding her mother’s house in Providencia after Hurricane Iota, and seeing firsthand how often climate systems fail the very communities they claim to serve.
Again and again, she returns to one truth: the people most affected must be at the center of the solution.
She shares how participatory mapping can bring local stories, wisdom, and lived realities into planning. She reflects on the frustration of handing over climate plans that never get implemented. And she offers a bold challenge to the adaptation sector: stop rewarding paperwork and start funding continuity, trust, and local agency.
One of the most exciting parts of this episode is Laura’s vision for the ITACA Collective — a growing ecosystem of regional experts that she hopes will become the go-to network for resilience and adaptation across the Caribbean. It is a move away from fragmented consultancy and toward a more decentralized, collaborative, and regionally rooted model.
She also speaks about building the future workforce for the blue economy. Through ITACA Learn, she wants to help connect communities to real skills, real opportunities, and real ownership in the projects shaping their future.
This is not just a conversation about climate. It is a conversation about power, process, justice, and what it means to build something that lasts.
Highlights from the conversation
Laura’s belief that communities must be seen as actors and agents of change, not passive recipients.
Why local knowledge + science is a stronger formula than outside expertise alone.
Her powerful critique that climate adaptation often ends with plans, not implementation.
The deeply personal story of Itaca, the house her mother built, which later inspired the name and soul of her company.
Why the blue economy could open more practical pathways for innovation and action than climate language alone.
How the ITACA Collective is being designed as a lasting ecosystem for resilience professionals in the Caribbean.
Female founder spotlight she mentions
Laura highlights Richenda Connell, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Acclimatise, as one of the women who shaped her professional practice. She admires Richenda for her professionalism, technical rigor, and the example she set simply through how she showed up in meetings, led conversations, and embodied strong practice. For Laura, Richenda was someone you could learn from just by listening through the wall — which says everything about the kind of leadership that leaves a mark.
Company Snapshot
ITACA Solutions is a Panama-based technical services provider focused on climate adaptation in coastal areas across the Caribbean, Central America, and Colombia. Through expert consulting, project development, and education and training, ITACA helps communities build resilience in ways that are scientifically strong, locally grounded, and built for long-term impact.
Powerful quote
“The plan is just a document, but really it is the process that matters the most.”
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