Nanotechnology
CIEL's Nanotechnologies Project aims to advance an international framework for regulating the burgeoning field of nanotechnologies, which promise potentially significant environmental and health benefits, but also pose potentially serious risks that regulators have scarcely begun to address.

The world is gravely unprepared to meet these risks, including those that can only be dealt with at the international level. Yet bringing precaution into the global management of nanotechnologies is enormously challenging, especially in light of the commercial pressures to expand nanotech applications and the reluctance of most governments to address their potential dangers.

The CIEL Nanotechnologies Project focuses on:

  • Strengthening the capacity of NGOs to grapple with the legal challenges presented by nanotechnologies and materials, including by chairing the nanotechnologies working group of the International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN);

  • Engaging and raising awareness among civil society on the potential for existing international processes, such as the Organization for the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials and the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM), to confront these issues; and

  • Engaging progressive governments and regions, such as the European Union, to incorporate a precautionary approach on nanotechnologies that will, in turn, support and leverage an effective international framework.


A threshold question in moving towards a global, precautionary framework for nanotechnologies is whether nanotechnologies and materials present an issue of global concern warranting global action. CIEL prepared an in-depth analysis of this question and released it in May 2009 at the Second International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM-2).

For more information, please contact David Azoulay. For additional information about the IPEN nanotechnologies working group, please contact David Azoulay or click here.