Transitional Initiatives supporting the change towards the phasing out of animal testing in chemical safety assessment

The European Commission is committed to phasing out animal testing for chemical safety assessments, as highlighted in its response to the European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Save cruelty-free cosmetics – Commit to a Europe without animal testing’. To achieve this goal, the Commission has been developing a roadmap, in collaboration with EU agencies and stakeholders. The roadmap aims to accelerate many activities contributing to the replacement or reduction of animal use in regulatory testing across a range of sectors. In this paper, we explain how these activities can be conceptualised as Transitional Initiatives, each of which produces outputs leading to outcomes that potentially contribute to the final impact of phasing out animal testing. The Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has established a dynamic online catalogue of these initiatives which will help to inform strategy and avoid duplicative efforts during the implementation phase of the roadmap. All stakeholders are invited to inspect the catalogue and notify the JRC of any relevant initiatives of their own. This paper explains the rationale behind Transitional Initiatives along with practical details of the notification process.