Christopher John Topping‡, Noa Simon Delso§, James Henty Williams|, Johan Axelman¶Corresponding author: Christopher John Topping ( cjt@agro.au.dk ) © Christopher John Topping, Noa Simon Delso, James Henty Williams, Johan Axelman. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Topping CJ, Simon Delso N, Williams JH, Axelman J (2025) Reforming EU chemical risk assessment: from regulatory bottlenecks to systems solutions. . https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e180508 |  |
EU chemical regulation remains slow, costly, and prone to “ecological surprises” such as unforeseen negative impacts, delayed neonicotinoid bans and ongoing pollinator
decline. Current approaches create silos, overlook cumulative impacts, and trap decisions in binary “safe/unsafe” categories.
A systems-first, tools-second approach can deliver faster, cheaper, and more effective decisions by prioritising simulation and systems understanding before developing regulatory tools for
Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA).
Horizon Europe’s PollinERA project demonstrates how this can work in practice: building a prototype One System
workflow with interoperable data and models for pollinator risk assessment; an approach that can be expanded to other environmental domains.