Dear Colleagues,

Key enabling technologies (KETs) such as advanced materials and nano and biotechnologies have emerged across a broad range of industries and applications. The KETs have appeared so fast on the market that it has become a real challenge to accommodate them correctly and uniformly across all involved regulatory domains (e.g., chemicals, electronics, cosmetics, biocides, consumer products, medicine). This has resulted in a major hurdle to appropriately govern the potential societal and environmental risks of these technologies without compromising the economic benefits that they can deliver. To promote sustainable innovation, an inclusive, credible, and science-based process for risk governance is required for the current and future generations of KETs. This process should rely on sound scientific knowledge regarding the properties and the biological/ecological interactions of the novel materials, as well as on tailored regulatory guidance and standard guidelines to ensure their safety. A more resilient and adaptive form of risk governance is required that should promote clear and transparent communication of risks and uncertainties, and requires proactive participation of key stakeholders (industry, SMEs, regulation, academia, civil society). In this Special Issue, we seek to engage with scholars and stakeholders from these communities and invite manuscript submissions on theoretical and empirical research on a range of themes related to safety and sustainability of KETs, including, but not limited to the following:

• Risk assessment
• Safe and sustainable by design
• Risk management
• Risk governance
• Life cycle assessment

Dr. Danail Hristozov
Dr. Lisa Pizzol
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• key enabling technologies
• risk governance
• innovation
• risk assessment
• risk management
• sustainability assessment