SustainNatural – 2026 - Safe and Sustainable Natural Products and Climate-Resilient Innovations Conference: Pharmacology Perspectives

Natural products remain one of the richest sources of new therapeutics; most clinically used drugs today can trace their origin, directly or indirectly, to a plant, fungus, or marine organism first studied through ethnopharmacology. Yet the biological systems that produce these compounds are changing faster than our research pipelines can adapt. Rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, soil degradation, and habitat loss are already measurably altering the phytochemical profiles, yields, and geographic availability of medicinal species. A compound characterised as safe and effective a decade ago may now come from a plant population that no longer grows where it used to or no longer produces the same concentration of active metabolites. This is not a hypothetical future problem; recent work has documented these shifts across hundreds of medicinal plant species, including high-altitude and climate-sensitive taxa.
At the same time, global demand for natural-derived pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and cosmetics continues to rise, increasing pressure on already strained natural systems. Researchers working on drug discovery, extraction, and formulation are increasingly being asked to answer two questions at once: Does this natural product work safely? and Can we continue producing it responsibly as the climate that shaped it keeps changing? Too often, these two conversations pharmacological safety and efficacy on one hand, sustainable and climate-resilient production on the other occur in separate literatures. This Research Topic aims to bring them together.
We seek research that treats sustainability and climate resilience not as a footnote to pharmacology, but as variables that actively shape pharmacological outcomes. Does a greener extraction method change the bioactivity profile of the compound it isolates? Does a climate-adapted cultivation strategy affect the safety or potency of the resulting extract? Can a product be demonstrated to be both therapeutically sound and environmentally viable on a commercial scale? These are the questions the field must answer now, before supply instability becomes a crisis.
This Topic is organised to run alongside SustainNatural 2026, a conference convened in Prague specifically around the intersection of natural product science, safety, and climate adaptation, co-chaired by Patrícia Rijo and Kateřina Valentová (Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences). Building the collection around the conference ensures that researchers presenting their most current work have an immediate, peer-reviewed venue to publish the full findings behind their talks, rather than dispersing them across proceedings, slide decks, and delayed follow-up papers. It also ensures that Frontiers becomes the lasting, open-access record of a conversation that would otherwise unfold over three days and then disappear.
We welcome original research, reviews, and case studies addressing (but not limited to):
• Pharmacological safety, efficacy, or toxicological evaluation of natural products, with explicit attention to how sustainable or climate-adapted sourcing/production affects bioactivity
• Green and resource-efficient extraction, biosynthesis including biotransformation, or formulation methods, and their impact on the safety and potency of bioactive compounds
• Climate-resilient cultivation, wild-harvesting, or supply-chain strategies for medicinal species under environmental stress
• Circular-economy and waste-valorisation approaches to producing natural products, including validation of the resulting compounds’ pharmacological activity
• Regulatory, quality-control, and standardisation frameworks needed to scale sustainable natural products responsibly
• Computational or AI-driven approaches to natural product discovery, paired with experimental or ethnobotanical evidence of therapeutic relevance
As with other collections in this section, all submissions must follow the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology and the ConPhyMP statement (Front. Pharmacol., 13:953205), with full descriptions of plant material, extraction, and processing. Manuscripts lacking this information will be desk-rejected. Purely computational or network-only studies without an experimental or ethnobotanical component fall outside the scope. Best-practice guidance: ga-online.org/best-practice.
Climate change is already reshaping the raw material of pharmacology. This Research Topic offers a timely opportunity to ensure science keeps pace by giving natural product researchers, including those gathering in Prague this November, a shared and rigorous venue to demonstrate that a natural product can be both proven safe and built to last.