Insurability under uncertainty: A technology‐readiness and safe‐by‐design framework for engineered nanomaterials

Abstract

Engineered nanomaterials promise transformative benefits across manufacturing, medicine, energy, and environmental remediation, yet they advance faster than the safety knowledge needed to price and transfer their hazards. The problem they pose runs deeper than measurable risk. At its core is uncertainty: toxicology is incomplete, latency is long and hard to bound, regulation is still forming, causal pathways are ambiguous, and liabilities may correlate across an entire material class. Technology Readiness Level (TRL) assessments gauge technical maturity without asking whether a technology's safety profile is characterized well enough to support sound investment or durable risk transfer. This paper proposes and demonstrates an integrated framework that pairs TRL with Safe‐by‐Design (SbD) principles to track technical and safety readiness on parallel axes. Its purpose is to govern that uncertainty, and it reads safety readiness as a measure of how much confidence a benefit estimate can bear. Insurability, on this view, is an evolving negotiation among developers, insurers, and public actors, and readiness signals where along that path a technology sits. The framework gives funders, insurers, and policymakers a shared reference for matching innovation trajectories to the conditions that responsible commercialization and workable coverage require.