top of page

FAQ
Frequently asked questions
General
Setting up FAQs
Sustainability reporting has spent a decade learning to see Risk. We help you see the other half. Nemetan is pioneering a systematic, evidence-based approach to Sustainability Opportunity Discovery: we read what your own disclosures, and your competitors', already contain, find the Opportunities that reporting tends to leave thin, and turn them into moves worth making. It is the same evidence most companies file once and never open again. We go back and look for the upside sitting in it. Risk gets managed by instinct all the time. Opportunity never should.
Double materiality asks every company to weigh three things alike: its Impacts, its Risks and its Opportunities. Watch how they are actually treated, and the third one is starved. TCFD gives Risk a full management pillar and Opportunity none. ESRS names its central process "Impact, Risk and Opportunity management", and then most assessments fill the Risk column and leave the Opportunity column thin. Europe's own EFRAG data puts it at 3.1 Risks to 2.0 Opportunities on climate, the one topic where Opportunity reporting is most developed. Look past climate, and the balance tilts further still. We call it the Stunted O: capital I, capital R, small o. Closing that gap is the whole point of Nemetan.
Sustainability reporting is a young field, and it is changing quickly. Double materiality, ESRS, TNFD and a steady stream of new requirements keep reshaping what companies must disclose, and the scope keeps widening. Obligations are reaching down toward organisations that sit under today's thresholds, through their value chain, their lenders, their buyers, or voluntary standards such as VSME. Nobody has this fully worked out yet. The whole field is still being figured out in real time. That is exactly why the Opportunity side deserves attention now, while everyone else races to keep up with the Risk and compliance demands and leaves the upside unexplored. Nemetan is pioneering that neglected side while the field is still forming. Engage early, and you are ahead of a curve that is only going to steepen.
As a Chartered Director with the Institute of Directors, Mike Kelly found the same questions flagging themselves as his research progressed. They are the questions any board can reasonably put to itself.On the Opportunities the company pursues: Are we searching for sustainable Opportunities as systematically as we manage sustainability Risks, or is one disciplined and the other left to instinct? Could we show that our pursuit of value creation is a real, repeatable process rather than an occasional workshop or a statement of intent? If a competitor captured a Shared Value Opportunity before us, could we honestly say we had gone looking for it with any rigour?On the Opportunities the company reports: Does our double materiality assessment report material Opportunities to the same standard as our Risks and Impacts, or is the Opportunity column visibly thinner? If an assurer, investor or board committee asked whether we searched for upside with the same discipline as downside, what evidence could we point to? Are we confident our reporting of Opportunity meets the standard double materiality expects, and not just the parts that are easiest to complete?And one that sits above the rest: whose job is it, at board level, to make sure Opportunity is not left as the neglected third column?These are the questions Nemetan was built to help a board answer, on both counts: a systematic, evidence-based way to pursue sustainable Opportunities, and to show that Opportunity has been searched to the standard double materiality expects.This is general information, not legal advice; directors' duties and double materiality obligations vary by jurisdiction, and a board should confirm its specific position with its own advisers.
We are not here to replace your double materiality assessment, your assurer or your reporting team, and we are not competing with them. We work alongside them, on the same disclosures. Your DMA and your assurer exist to get the Risk and compliance side right. Nemetan takes that same material and chases the question they are not resourced to chase: where is the Opportunity nobody has gone looking for? Complementary, not competing. We are the specialist you bring in for the half of double materiality everyone else is too busy to search.
We consider it to be based in "shared value" so here is the test we hold to: A Sustainability Opportunity is a move where the business benefit and the sustainability benefit come from the same decision. Not two things you trade off against each other, but one decision that pays twice. That rules a lot out. A cost that buys goodwill is not an Opportunity. A Risk you avoided, dressed up as a gain, is not an Opportunity. If the commercial win and the sustainability win do not arrive together, from the same decision, it does not count. One decision, two returns. That is the whole bar.
Every precedent in our library has to earn its place, and nothing counts as evidence until it passes the same five tests: a clearly defined problem, an implemented response rather than an ambition, a real business benefit, a real environmental or social benefit, and enough published evidence to tell reported results from projected ones. We are just as careful about what we then claim. Every Opportunity we hand you is offered as evidence of possibility, with its assumptions written down, never as a guarantee. A precedent shows a thing can be done. It does not promise the same result will transfer to you, and we say so plainly. Intelligence without a verified base to reason over is just a confident guess.
Our method is systematic, and tools do the heavy, repeatable work: structuring disclosures, screening precedents against the five tests, surfacing candidate matches. But the analysis is never handed to a machine. Every Opportunity we put in front of you is shaped, checked and judged by a person, with its assumptions, uncertainties and the questions that need internal validation made explicit. The tools make the search thorough and repeatable. The judgement about what actually matters, and how far a precedent really transfers, is human. The discipline of a system, with the judgement of an expert who will tell you what he is unsure of.
The method did not come from nowhere. It grew directly out of the primary research Mike Kelly conducted during his MSc in Sustainability Management at Rotterdam School of Management, an institution consistently named among the global leaders in sustainability management. That research into how organisations report Risk and Opportunity became its foundation, and it dovetailed with a career spent where governance, finance, innovation and enterprise meet. Mike Kelly is a qualified Chartered Director with the Institute of Directors; holds the GRI ESRS professional certification; studied Disruptive Innovation under Hal Gregersen, co-author with Clay Christensen, at MIT Sloan; is a certified banker with the Chartered Banker Institute and holds its Certificate in Green and Sustainable Finance; holds a BSc in Management from Trinity College, Dublin; and brings more than 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur in international business. Original research, board-level judgement, sustainability evidence, systematic innovation and real commercial experience, brought together in one method. That combination is rare, and it is where Nemetan comes from.
Nemetan takes its name from the nemeton, a defined, ordered space set apart at the heart of the ancient Celtic world: the place where a community's elders and law-keepers gathered to weigh hard matters, settle disputes and see clearly before they acted. A space for counsel and sound judgement. You went there to think straight. Sustainability disclosure has become genuinely hard to see through, and both hidden Risk and unrealised Opportunity are easily lost in the noise. Nemetan is that clear space. The logo carries the same idea. The mark is a broken green ring with a blue dot at its centre. That open ring is a stunted "O": the very shape of the problem we exist to correct, an Opportunity left incomplete. Rendered in the brand green, the colour that means Opportunity throughout our work, the logo is the argument in miniature. The unfinished Opportunity that reporting leaves thin, and the point we put back at the centre.
Not to get started, no. The entry points run entirely on public information. The free Gap Check and the €950 Taster read a public disclosure or report, so you see the quality of the work before you share anything internal. No confidential upload required. If a deeper engagement later would benefit from internal material, that is your call, on your terms, once you have already seen what we do. You show us nothing private to find out whether this is worth it.
Everything is delivered as a written report you can read, share and act on, sent to you digitally. A one-topic Taster is typically delivered within three working days of a short scoping call. Larger reports are scoped and scheduled with you when you commission them. There is no committed call baked into a product, which is what keeps them quick and scalable. If you want to talk the findings through, an advisory call can be added separately.
Wherever the size of your question fits. If you just want to see where you stand, start free: the Gap Check scores your Risk-versus-Opportunity balance in about ninety seconds. If you want to prove the method on something real, the €950 Taster runs it in full on one material topic (but not your main topic as it needs to be representative). Most importantly, we recommend that you start with the deliberately designed low-cost, low-risk "Taster" product and short courses to decide if we are a good fit together. Later, if you want the whole landscape, that is a report. And if you would rather learn to do it yourself, the Academy teaches the method end to end. Still not sure? Book a 20-minute call and we will point you to the smallest sensible first step, not the biggest. Start small, and climb only as far as the decision in front of you needs.
Our certificates are professional certificates, not academic qualifications, and they are accredited by the Nemetan Academy. The goal is genuine learning and development in an emerging field: you leave able to apply a systematic method to your own work, rather than with a university credential. In a discipline this new, where the practice is still being defined, that practical capability is exactly what the field needs.
No. Our products are digital, and they are delivered in full the moment they are purchased. A report, a course or a template is yours immediately, fully consumed at the point of sale, so we do not offer refunds once a purchase is made. We built the offering around that fact. Rather than ask you to place a large bet and lean on a refund if it disappoints, we made the first steps small: the free Gap Check and Maturity Matrix, the €950 one-topic Taster, and the €300 short courses. Start small, see the quality for yourself, and step up only when you are sure. The low-cost entry points are the guarantee.
bottom of page