Suchergebnisse

Recent political, military and technological developments demonstrate that the consensus enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty (1967) and other international agreements is under threat. According to the author, agreement on preventive arms control in space could soon be reached, as long as all countries choose to cooperate.

Since the end of the Cold War, rapid progress in commercial technology, along with the War on Terror and international peace enforcing missions, have been driving precision and remote control warfare. But these weapons do not fulfill the promise of 'bloodless' war. One US researcher speculates that the US may not have killed sufficient enemies in the second Gulf War. Precision warfare may fail to force the enemy into submission, because it does not last long enough and because it does not undermine military and civilian morale. Still, there are alternatives to this vicious cycle of perpetual precision warfare. Several other solutions have been proposed, including employing more military force, utilizing more police and intelligence methods, and using more good old-fashioned diplomacy.

Nanotechnologies have reached maturity and market penetration that require nano-specific changes in legislation and harmonization among legislation domains, such as the amendments to REACH for nanomaterials (NMs) which came into force in 2020. Thus, an assessment of the components and regulatory boundaries of NMs risk governance is timely, alongside related methods and tools, as part of the global efforts to optimise nanosafety and integrate it into product design processes, via Safe(r)-by-Design (SbD) concepts. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art regarding risk governance of NMs and lays out the theoretical basis for the development and implementation of an effective, trustworthy and transparent risk governance framework for NMs. The proposed framework enables continuous integration of the evolving state of the science, leverages best practice from contiguous disciplines and facilitates responsive re-thinking of nanosafety governance to meet future needs. To achieve and operationalise such framework, a science-based Risk Governance Council (RGC) for NMs is being developed. The framework will provide a toolkit for independent NMs' risk governance and integrates needs and views of stakeholders. An extension of this framework to relevant advanced materials and emerging technologies is also envisaged, in view of future foundations of risk research in Europe and globally.