Abstract: Due to current consumption patterns and increasing product complexity, the use of abiotic resources has been rising and has led to supply risk (criticality) challenges in many countries and regions including Europe. The SCARCE method, originally developed to assess criticality in Germany, includes several criticality determinants that are missing from the existing European method by Pennington et al. (2017). Specifically it i) considers additional supply risk and vulnerability categories like price fluctuations, long term availability and importance in future technologies ii) takes a sustainability perspective by including environmental and social aspects of resource use iii) enables the comparison of the European supply risk with the global supply risk. Therefore, we have applied the SCARCE method to perform a criticality assessment of European resource use considering eleven supply risk categories (e.g. trade barriers and political stability) and six vulnerability categories (e.g. economic importance and substitutability) for 42 materials (including metals, metalloids and fossil fuels). In our assessment, the most critical materials for Europe are petroleum oils, gallium, rare earths and phosphorus, because of their high supply risk impacts due to high primary material use, high trade barriers and low political stability in mining countries as well as vulnerability impacts (due to their high economic importance, high utilization in future technologies and low substitutability). The three materials with the worst social performance (considering small scale mining, human rights abuse and geopolitical risk) are tantalum, cobalt and tin (e.g. because of high production share in small scale mining for tin), while the materials with the worst environmental performance (considering greenhouse gas emissions, water scarcity and sensitivity of the local biodiversity) are gold, platinum and niobium (e.g. because of a high amount of associated greenhouse gas emissions for gold). Our findings show that the European supply risk does not differ significantly from the global supply risk, but some assessment categories show different tendencies. Compared to the global production, the mining capacity of the countries that are exporting to Europe is lower, because the European import mix is often dominated by one country only while the global production is more diverse. Further, countries that are currently exporting to Europe have higher political stability than the countries that dominate the global production, which indicates that Europe might have to develop new trade relations with politically unstable countries to meet its domestic material demand. Overall, our assessment results are in line with the finding of the previously conducted study on critical raw materials by the European Union, but provide some additional insights by considering social and environmental impacts.