About Synestia

Valentina Baiamonte is a sustainability and ESG Strategy professional with a PhD and more than a decade of experience across academia, international organisations, and independent practice. Her work helps boards, investors, and operational teams integrating sustainability risk, reporting, and governance into real business decisions. 

Valentina’s approach combines quantitative research methods, including social network analysis and climate scenario modelling, with hands-on advisory work. It comes from an unusual path: a PhD from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, about environmental governance. Her doctoral research used network analysis to map the organisations shaping European climate and energy policy, tracing how influence moves between them. That technique is now applied to a different question, showing how sustainability risks connect across a value chain. At the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, she coordinated C-suite working groups on delinking business operations from overfishing and deforestation, and co-authored governance frameworks with the Institute of Internal Auditors and AICPA-CIMA, one of which now forms part of the certification training accountants receive. 

Today her advisory work spans sustainability reporting and double materiality, systemic risk assessment, strategy, sustainable sourcing, and capacity building, for organisations ranging from manufacturers and food companies, to central banks and public institutions. A recurring theme runs through: treating sustainability compliance not as a box to tick, but as a way to build resilience and inform better decisions. She has trained more than 100 senior executives, teaches quantitative methods at master’s and PhD level, and publishes in peer-reviewed journals. 

Based in Geneva, she works in English, French, Italian, and Portuguese.  

Outside the advisory work, Valentina is a PADI-certified scuba diving instructor, currently teaching in Geneva. She has previously volunteered with Livingseas in Bali on coral planting, and remains involved in environmental conservation, both in the water and on land.