Policy Paper: Unlocking Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) in Europe: Bottlenecks, Challenges, and Prospective Priorities

This policy paper presents insights from stakeholders across industry, research, academia, civil society, and consulting on the key barriers and policy tools needed to scale Europe’s critical raw materials (CRM) value chains.

The analysis is based on structured stakeholder input collected in preparation for the Raw Materials Week 2025 side event “Crossroads of Innovation: Shared Challenges and Joint Solutions in Raw Materials”, co-organised by Horizon Europe projects active across the CRM ecosystem.

The findings indicate that progress towards the objectives of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) is not primarily constrained by resource availability or technological readiness, but by implementation challenges. These include limited financing for pilot and first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plants, fragmented regulatory frameworks, permitting complexity, gaps in exploration and scale-up capacity, and social acceptance barriers.

The paper outlines a set of practical policy directions to address these bottlenecks, including de-risking industrial scale-up, improving regulatory coherence, strengthening permitting predictability, enhancing transparency and traceability, reinforcing exploration capacity, and embedding early and meaningful community engagement.

By bringing together stakeholder perspectives across the CRM value chain, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions on how to translate CRMA targets into effective industrial deployment and resilient, domestically anchored supply chains in Europe.