Capacity-building for a Pan-European training partnership for safe and sustainable-by-design nano- and advanced materials: stakeholder-informed perspectives and future directions

1 Introduction

Advanced materials, including nanomaterials, are increasingly recognized as strategic enablers of Europe’s green and digital transitions, with applications across key sectors such as energy, construction, mobility, electronics, and health (AMI 2030, 2022; IAM-I, 2024). Recent European policy initiatives, shaped by the Draghi Report (Draghi, 2024), emphasize the importance of advanced materials for industrial competitiveness, technological sovereignty, and sustainable innovation (European Comission, 2025; European Commission, 2025a; European Commission, 2025b; European Commission, 2025c; European Parliament, 2024).

Within this agenda, the Strategy on Advanced Materials for Leadership (European Commission, 2024b) includes 14 actions across themes such as boosting research and innovation, accelerating the transition from laboratory to industrial scale, increasing investment, enabling production and use of advanced materials, and establishing new governance structures like the Technology Council for Advanced Materials (European Commission, 2024a).

The Technology Council’s Subgroup on the Uptake and Deployment of Advanced Materials has recently made a number of recommendations on improving the uptake and use of advanced materials in Europe, including ones on supporting education and skills for advanced materials and ensuring the efficiency of the standards and regulations required to help new advanced materials enter the marketplace (Technology Council for Advanced Materials, 2025b).

Within this context, Safe and Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) has emerged as a key framework for integrating safety and sustainability considerations throughout the innovation life cycle of chemicals and materials (Abbate et al., 2024; Caldeira et al., 2022; Garmendia et al., 2025). However, achieving effective SSbD implementation will require well-trained experts capable of conducting an array of interdisciplinary assessments and overseeing the aggregation of data from diverse dimensions, including functional material performance and impacts on human health (based on the Malta Initiative-prioritized map of OECD Test Guidelines (Heunisch et al., 2024)).

Although rooted in the EU’s long-standing commitment to responsible innovation, the current community of researchers and stakeholders working on SSbD is mostly limited to nanosafety and sustainability experts, with a lesser role for ethicists and social scientists. Recent work, however, has expanded social and economic sustainability assessments (Garmendia et al., 2025), highlighting the need to integrate Social Science and Humanities (SSH) theories and case studies into SSbD training.

Several initiatives have begun mapping SSbD competencies and supporting capacity-building activities, but a comprehensive overview of competency needs, training approaches, and system-level requirements remains lacking. Furthermore, practical perspectives from researchers, industry representatives, policy actors, and other stakeholders have rarely been considered alongside the emerging literature.

This Perspective contributes to the emerging discussion on capacity-building for SSbD in nano- and advanced materials by examining how competency development, training approaches, and stakeholder engagement can support the broader implementation of SSbD. Drawing on recent literature, policy developments, existing training initiatives, and stakeholder-informed perspectives, we discuss the competencies and system-level conditions needed to strengthen SSbD capacity-building across research, industry, and policy communities.

Building on these insights, we argue for the development of a coordinated European training ecosystem capable of supporting education, reskilling, and upskilling training throughout the innovation lifecycle. The Perspective is informed by targeted and non-targeted stakeholder engagement activities conducted at the SSbD2024 conference, the EthicsbyDesign2024 online conference, and the STS Conference Graz 2025, which provided exploratory perspectives on emerging training needs and implementation challenges. Rather than presenting a comprehensive review of the field, the article highlights current advances, identifies persistent gaps related to fragmented expertise, infrastructure, and curricula, and proposes future directions for establishing a Pan-European training partnership that could ultimately evolve into a broader international capacity-building network for SSbD training, reskilling, and upskilling.

2 Current advances and remaining gaps in SSbD capacity-building

The guidelines for the SSbD framework, prepared by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), indicate that its implementation will require integrating knowledge and expertise from various scientific, technical, social, and policy domains (Caldeira et al., 2022). Consequently, applying the Safe and Sustainable-by-Design framework requires interdisciplinary expertise that spans material design, risk assessment, life-cycle thinking, sustainability assessment, ethics, governance, and stakeholder engagement. Although rooted in the EU’s long-standing commitment to responsible innovation, the current community of researchers and stakeholders working on SSbD is mostly limited to nanosafety and sustainability experts, with a lesser role for ethicists and social scientists.

Recent developments have expanded the consideration of social and economic sustainability dimensions within the SSbD framework, highlighting the need to better integrate SSH perspectives, theories, and case studies into future education and training programs (Garmendia et al., 2025). In parallel, emerging studies on SSbD capacity-building emphasize the need for a common educational foundation combining technical competencies with social, ethical, and communication skills (Apel et al., 2024; Bechu et al., 2022). Further evidence from a survey of 172 members of the international nanotechnology community suggests that future training programs should move beyond technical risk and sustainability assessment to include socio-economic evaluation, implementation challenges, stakeholder engagement, and decision-making under uncertainty (Mays et al., 2024).

Several initiatives have begun addressing these needs through training and capacity-building activities. These include competence mapping efforts led by the Network for Safety and sustainability of Chemicals and materials (NSC, formerly known as EU NanoSafetyCluster) ¹ , annual SSbD Boot Camps organized by the JRC and the Horizon Europe Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC), conference-based training courses, university graduate programs related to sustainability or safety, and emerging SSbD-focused educational activities. More recently, initiatives such as the European Advanced Materials Academy and the Swedish Mistra SafeChem research program (Munthe et al., 2025) have expanded the discussion beyond academic education by promoting modular training, lifelong learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and workforce development for safer and more sustainable innovation. A non-exhaustive overview of selected initiatives supporting SSbD- and advanced-materials-related education, training, and workforce development is provided in Supplementary Material Table S1.

Despite these advances, several challenges remain. Existing training activities are often project-based, topic-specific, or limited in duration and geographic reach. While competency requirements are increasingly discussed, considerably less attention has been devoted to translating these needs into coordinated educational pathways, harmonized curricula, and long-term capacity-building mechanisms. Furthermore, training opportunities remain largely discipline-specific despite the interdisciplinary nature of SSbD, and limited attention has been given to governance structures, collaborative training networks, and mechanisms for sustaining capacity-building beyond individual projects. These gaps suggest the need for a more coordinated approach capable of supporting education, reskilling, and upskilling across research, industry, and policy communities.

To complement this perspective, stakeholder-informed insights gathered through recent engagement activities are presented in the following section. These perspectives provide further practical reflections on competency needs, implementation challenges, and future priorities for developing a coordinated SSbD training ecosystem.

3 Interactive data-gathering and stakeholder perspectives

To complement the literature and emerging training initiatives discussed above, exploratory stakeholder engagement activities were conducted during the SSbD2024 conference, the EthicsbyDesign2024 online conference, and the STS Conference Graz 2025 (Supplementary Material Table S2). These activities included an interactive poster session, an online presentation with a moderated Q&A session, and World Café discussions involving participants from academia, industry, consulting, and policy-related backgrounds. The objective was not to generate representative empirical evidence, but rather to gather practical perspectives on emerging training needs, implementation challenges, and future priorities for SSbD capacity-building. Detailed activity descriptions, workshop outputs, voting results, posters, and supplementary tables are provided in the Supplementary Information.

Participation in these activities was voluntary, and all contributions were collected anonymously. No personal, sensitive, or identifiable information was recorded, retained, or analyzed. The stakeholder-informed perspectives presented here therefore represent aggregated and thematic observations rather than individual responses. Given the exploratory nature of the activities and the limited number of participants involved, the findings should be interpreted as illustrative perspectives that complement the literature and existing capacity-building initiatives rather than as representative views of the wider SSbD community.

Across the different engagement activities, several recurring themes emerged. Stakeholders emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary competencies that combine risk assessment, sustainability assessment, systems thinking, communication, and stakeholder engagement (Supplementary Material Figure S1; Supplementary Material Table S3). Ethical and SSH dimensions, including Responsible Research and Innovation, science communication, international collaboration, and societal impact considerations, were consistently highlighted as important elements of future training programs (Supplementary Material Figure S2, S3, Box 1-2). Participants also stressed the need for stronger engagement with industry stakeholders to ensure that SSbD training reflects sector-specific implementation challenges, in alignment with the research and innovation priority areas (Supplementary Material Figure S4) that the Commission previously defined—energy, construction, mobility, and electronics (European Commission, 2024b)—recently expanded to include health (Technology Council for Advanced Materials, 2025a).

These observations broadly align with the competency needs and gaps identified in the literature and reinforce the argument that effective SSbD implementation will require coordinated approaches to education, training, reskilling, and upskilling.

4 Future steps towards a training program in safe and sustainable nano-and advanced materials

Despite the growing maturity of the SSbD concept, important challenges remain regarding its practical implementation. Recent advances in methodology, assessment tools, and policy frameworks have strengthened the foundations for SSbD, yet persistent barriers related to data availability, interdisciplinary integration, harmonized terminology, and the translation of assessment results into innovation and industrial decision-making continue to limit broader uptake (Abbate et al., 2025; van Dijk et al., 2025). These challenges suggest that the successful implementation of SSbD will require not only technical solutions, but also coordinated capacity-building efforts capable of supporting learning and knowledge exchange across research, industry, and policy communities.

The competency synthesis presented in Table 1 highlights the diverse combination of technical competencies, transversal skills, ethical and Social Sciences and Humanities dimensions, and system-level requirements that future SSbD practitioners may require. Together with the stakeholder-informed perspectives gathered through the engagement activities, these findings point to the need for educational approaches that move beyond discipline-specific training and foster interdisciplinary collaboration, systems thinking, stakeholder engagement, and responsible innovation. While the stakeholder activities provided valuable practical insights, they involved a limited number of participants and cannot be considered representative of the broader European SSbD community. In particular, the limited participation of industry stakeholders emphasizes the need for further engagement with industrial associations, SMEs, start-ups, consultants, and sector-specific experts to better identify implementation challenges and tailor future training approaches to the needs of sectors such as mobility, construction, electronics, energy, and health.

TABLE 1. Main identified Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design training requirements for nano- and advanced materials.

Building on these observations, Figure 1 proposes a conceptual structure for a European SSbD training ecosystem that links competency development with system enablers and implementation outcomes. Rather than representing a prescriptive model, the ecosystem is intended as a discussion framework for coordinating existing initiatives, educational resources, communities of practice, and emerging training infrastructures. In this context, priority actions include strengthening collaboration among existing European initiatives, developing modular and multilingual curricula, expanding lifelong learning opportunities, and facilitating broader participation from industrial and societal stakeholders.

The proposed partnership should also build on existing resources and avoid duplicating efforts already underway within the European SSbD community. In particular, harmonized terminology has been identified as a prerequisite for effective communication, training, and implementation across disciplines and sectors. Existing initiatives, such as the PLANETS project’s SSbD Workbook (Steck et al., 2026) and the PARC SSbD Toolbox ² , provide valuable foundations that could be integrated into future curricula and training materials. Building on such resources would not only facilitate a shared understanding of SSbD concepts but also accelerate the development of training programs by leveraging existing knowledge, tools, and community-driven efforts rather than creating new materials from scratch.

Ultimately, we argue that capacity-building should be considered a strategic enabling condition for the long-term operationalization of SSbD. Building on existing initiatives, tools, educational resources, and international communities, a Pan-European training partnership could provide a mechanism for coordinating expertise, reducing fragmentation, and accelerating the development of a skilled workforce capable of implementing SSbD principles across sectors and value chains. Such a partnership could build on existing European and international communities, including the International Network Initiative on Safe and Sustainable Nanotechnologies (INISS-Nano), which already promotes collaboration, knowledge exchange, and coordinated action within the SSbD community (Falk et al., 2022). By connecting education, training, reskilling, and upskilling with broader European objectives related to sustainability, industrial competitiveness, and innovation, the partnership could strengthen capacity-building efforts across research, industry, and policy while contributing to the development of a broader international network supporting the global uptake of SSbD approaches.

Correction note

A correction has been made to this article. Details can be found at: 10.3389/fnano.2026.1985099.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnano.2026.1913843/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Amitava Mukherjee, VIT University, India

Reviewed by: Lizandro Manzato, Amazonas, Brazil

Adam Kelly, Associação para a Inovação e Desenvolvimento da FCT (NOVA.ID.FCT), Portugal

Milan Drabik, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, United States

Footnotes

Network for Safety and sustainability of Chemicals and materials (NSC). Available online: https://nsc-community.eu/

PARC SSbD Toolbox. Available on https://www.parc-ssbd.eu/