PARC is an EU-wide research and innovation partnership programme to support EU and national chemical risk assessment and risk management bodies with new data, knowledge, methods, networks and skills to address current, emerging and novel chemical safety challenges. PARC will facilitate the transition to next generation risk assessment to better protect human health and the environment, in line with the Green Deal?s zero-pollution ambition for a toxic free environment and will be an enabler for the future EU ?Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability?. It builds in part on the work undertaken and experience acquired in past and on-going research and innovation actions, but goes beyond by its vocation to establish an EU-wide risk assessment hub of excellence. To contribute to several expected impacts of destination 2 ?Living and working in a health-promoting environment?, PARC will organise the activities to reach three specific objectives: - An EU-wide sustainable cross-disciplinary network to identify and agree on research and innovation needs and to support research uptake into regulatory chemical risk assessment. - Joint EU research and innovation activities responding to identified priorities in support of current regulatory risk assessment processes for chemical substances and to emerging challenges. - Strengthening existing capacities and building new transdisciplinary platforms to support chemical risk assessment. The Partnership brings together Ministries and national public health and risk assessment agencies, as well as research organisations and academia from almost all of EU Member States. Representatives of Directorates-General of the EC and EU agencies involved in the monitoring of chemicals and the assessment of risks are also participating. PARC will meet the needs of risk assessment agencies to better anticipate emerging risks and respond to the challenges and priorities of the new European policies.

The overarching goal of the European Human Biomonitoring Initiative (HBM4EU) is to generate knowledge to inform the safe management of chemicals and so protect human health. We will use human biomonitoring to understand human exposure to chemicals and resulting health impacts and will communicate with policy makers to ensure that our results are exploited in the design of new chemicals policies and the evaluation of existing measures. Key objectives include: • Harmonizing procedures for human biomonitoring across 26 countries, to provide policy makers with comparable data on human internal exposure to chemicals and mixtures of chemicals at EU level; • Linking data on internal exposure to chemicals to aggregate external exposure and identifying exposure pathways and upstream sources. Information on exposure pathways is critical to the design of targeted policy measures to reduce exposure; • Generating scientific evidence on the causal links between human exposure to chemicals and negative health outcomes; and • Adapting chemical risk assessment methodologies to use human biomonitoring data and account for the contribution of multiple external exposure pathways to the total chemical body burden. We will achieve these objectives by harmonizing human biomonitoring initiatives in 26 countries, drawing on existing expertise and building new capacities. By establishing National Hubs in each country to coordinate activities, we will create a robust Human Biomonitoring Platform at European level. This initiative contributes directly to the improvement of health and well-being for all age groups, by investigating how exposure to chemicals affects the health of different groups, such as children, pregnant women, foetuses and workers. We will also investigate how factor such as behavior, lifestyle and socio-economic status influence internal exposure to chemicals across the EU population. This knowledge will support policy action to reduce chemical exposure and protect health.