Europe is building a single, coordinated system to assess chemical risks, replacing the current patchwork of national efforts. The PARC programme brings together regulators, scientists, and public health agencies from nearly every EU member state to generate the data, methods, and expertise needed to evaluate both existing chemicals and novel ones before they reach the market. This matters because current chemical risk assessment is slow, fragmented, and often fails to anticipate emerging threats. Regulators lack shared tools and real-time data to judge whether a new industrial solvent, pesticide, or plastic additive poses a danger to human health or the environment. PARC aims to close that gap by creating a permanent EU-wide hub where research directly feeds into regulatory decisions. If successful, the programme could transform how chemicals are approved and monitored across Europe. Instead of each country running its own assessments, agencies would share standardised methods and pooled data. This would speed up the identification of hazardous substances, support the EU’s zero-pollution goals, and help prevent harmful chemicals from quietly accumulating in water, soil, and human tissue. The partnership also builds capacity to spot emerging risks—such as those from novel materials—before they become widespread problems.
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PARC is an EU-wide research and innovation partnership programme to support EU and national chemical risk assessment and risk management bodies with new data, knowledge, methods, networks and skills to address current, emerging and novel chemical safety challenges. PARC will facilitate the transition to next generation risk assessment to better protect human health and the environment, in line with the Green Deal?s zero-pollution ambition for a toxic free environment and will be an enabler for the future EU ?Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability?. It builds in part on the work undertaken and experience acquired in past and on-going research and innovation actions, but goes beyond by its vocation to establish an EU-wide risk assessment hub of excellence. To contribute to several expected impacts of destination 2 ?Living and working in a health-promoting environment?, PARC will organise the activities to reach three specific objectives: - An EU-wide sustainable cross-disciplinary network to identify and agree on research and innovation needs and to support research uptake into regulatory chemical risk assessment. - Joint EU research and innovation activities responding to identified priorities in support of current regulatory risk assessment processes for chemical substances and to emerging challenges. - Strengthening existing capacities and building new transdisciplinary platforms to support chemical risk assessment. The Partnership brings together Ministries and national public health and risk assessment agencies, as well as research organisations and academia from almost all of EU Member States. Representatives of Directorates-General of the EC and EU agencies involved in the monitoring of chemicals and the assessment of risks are also participating. PARC will meet the needs of risk assessment agencies to better anticipate emerging risks and respond to the challenges and priorities of the new European policies.
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