The EU27 face fundamental challenges at a global level impacting the European raw materials supply: the COVID19 pandemic, strategic competition, inner European conflicts and EU sanctions, rising emerging economies and the ascent of new strategic collaboration patterns, such as BRIC/S or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The European Union committed to a fundamental change towards a new growth strategy, the GREEN DEAL, that considers climate change and environmental degradation as an existential threat to Europe and the world. In the same way Raw Materials disappeared in the successor to the Horizon 2020 programme, Horizon Europe, and is now hidden behind ‘Industry and Digitization’. With these new challenges in mind, there is need to successively build up the Horizon Europe work programme. The need for a European Critical Raw Materials Act proposed by the EC might help address this issue.
