Abstract
Nanotechnologies have been increasingly used in industrial applications and consumer products across several sectors, including construction, transportation, energy, and healthcare. The widespread application of these technologies has raised concerns regarding their environmental, health, societal, and economic impacts. This has led to the investment of enormous resources in Europe and beyond into the development of tools to facilitate the risk assessment and management of nanomaterials, and to inform more robust risk governance process. In this context, several risk governance frameworks have been developed. In our study, we present and review those, and identify a set of criteria and tools for risk evaluation, mitigation, and communication, the implementation of which can inform better risk management decision-making by various stakeholders from e.g., industry, regulators, and the civil society. Based on our analysis, we recommend specific methods from decision science and information technologies that can improve the existing risk governance tools so that they can communicate, evaluate, and mitigate risks more transparently, taking stakeholder perspectives and expert opinion into account, and considering all relevant criteria in establishing the risk-benefit balance of these emerging technologies to enable more robust decisions about the governance of their risks.
Highlights
Nanotechnologies have been increasingly used in industrial applications and consumer products across several sectors, including construction, transportation, energy, and healthcare
The 37 identified criteria are not applicable or suitable for assessing all the tools since those tools have been developed for different purposes and in response to different stakeholder needs [16]
Significant advances have been made during the last decade in the field of risk governance of manufactured nanomaterials (MNs), which have resulted in the development of frameworks for regulating and organizing the risk governance processes in a unified and systematic way
Summary
Nanotechnologies have been increasingly used in industrial applications and consumer products across several sectors, including construction, transportation, energy, and healthcare. ISO 31000:2009 presents one of the first risk governance frameworks for new technologies, applicable to MNs. ISO 31000:2009 presents one of the first risk governance frameworks for new technologies, applicable to MNs This framework sets principles and provides generic guidelines on risk management to be applied by any organization regardless of its size, activity, or sector. It was updated in 2018 [9] and mainly focused on “risk assessment and treatment”, while “risk communication and monitoring” were identified as important aspects of the risk management decision-making process, but their significance was not thoroughly analyzed. Communication, stakeholder context, and public engagement serve as cross-cutting aspects of the framework
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