Failures cascade
Water, energy, food, health, ecosystems and infrastructure share dependencies. Assessing them separately misses the compound events that cause the greatest harm.
GCRI helps countries and institutions understand systemic risk, govern frontier technology and build the capability to act on what they learn. It is the research, development and policy institution of Nexus Consortiums, working across Canada and the United States.
People and hazardsPeople per land cell, from each country's Natural Earth population estimate. Select a cell for live events and its latest NASA POWER day.
The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI) is the Lead Institution, Consortium Secretariat and lead contracting organization of the Nexus Consortium. It turns national questions into testable work and keeps the records the programme runs on.
The Consortium, run from the technical office
What the Secretariat does with a mandate, end to end: the councils and national consortiums set the questions, the Secretariat scopes them and maps who holds each decision, the technical office registers and seals the evidence, binds and tests the methods, runs the Foundry's systems in neutral form, the platforms and national teams test the work in the field, and every finding is reviewed, published with its identifier and handed back to the institution that decides.
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About GCRI · Programmes and services · Nexus StandardsAn outline of how the work is designed to run; it does not report the status of any decision or record.
What it answers for
Risk technology and intelligence
Evidence, models, data and technology that turn national questions into reproducible analysis, tested systems and published findings.
Flood water, active fires and surface heat beside where people live and night-time lights, from NASA satellites, with elevation and live natural events. Switch layers, draw an area, read values and export an image with its citations.
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Layers 3
Hazards and exposure
Keyboard, with the map focused
Hold Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll to zoom
Latest available
NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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Drag to move. Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll, pinch or the buttons to zoom; hover for the values under the pointer; reset returns to the region.
Hazards and exposure, framed on Canada. Layers as NASA publishes them, each with its own date.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place.
Layers and dates
Why connected risk outruns sector-by-sector evidence, what GCRI does about it, the science it applies and how a question moves to a tested, published answer.
The systems that keep societies running depend on one another. A drought becomes a power shortage, a food price spike and a strain on hospitals. New technologies change both what can go wrong and what institutions can do about it. Most mandates, budgets and data are still organized one sector and one border at a time.
Water, energy, food, health, ecosystems and infrastructure share dependencies. Assessing them separately misses the compound events that cause the greatest harm.
Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum and autonomous systems create capability and exposure faster than institutions can evaluate or absorb them.
Ministries, operators and financial institutions often decide without shared evidence, tested options or a clear statement of uncertainty.
Fig. 02Six steps from a rainfall deficit to hospital continuity at risk, each with its own evidence label. Illustrative chain, not a forecast.
The sectors urban flood touches and how strongly they depend on each other: what a study has to observe and model together.
Choose a context
Sectors · Urban floodStress
Pillars · Urban floodKPI
In this contextDependence or handoff, heavier is strongerOutside this context
Programme yearAll phases
Context
Urban flood
Flooded streets take out substations, pumping stations and clinic access together; drinking water fails when power does.
W · E · I · F · H · B
Risk
Hover a corner, a line or a row to trace it across both sides.
Route
Applied to urban flood
L · F · U · S · R · A
Response
Expected value
Hover a pillar, a line or a row to read how it is applied.
A: a teaching cascade (shock 0.6, gain 0.35, four rounds) over teaching values for a typical city-region, not measurements. B: illustrative applications and the KPI each pillar answers for; values are published benchmarks, cited, not forecasts. Open events: NASA EONET, live.
Pick the open data layers, the hazards and an area, then build. Each step runs in your browser on data fetched now from open public sources, and the result lands on a real map.
Sources: NASA GIBS, NASA EONET, USGS earthquakes, Open-Meteo (ECMWF, Copernicus GloFAS and CAMS), Natural Earth. Coupling weights are teaching values; scores are illustrative, not an assessment.
How stress builds inland and travels through a country's systems after a shock, on real geography with elevation: the Lower Mekong at baseline, under drought and heat, and in the flood after the drought. Select a scenario; example levels, not results.
Fig. 01The Lower Mekong under a drought, heat or flood scenario. Real geography; illustrative levels, not results.
The National Model holds water, energy, food, health, biodiversity and critical infrastructure as one coupled system, cell by cell, with every value carrying its evidence label.
A rainfall deficit lowers reservoirs, cuts hydropower, strains the grid at evening peak and reaches water treatment and hospitals weeks later. Each step keeps its own label and its own confidence.
Intense rain on dry ground overwhelms drainage, inundates treatment works and pumping stations, and interrupts electricity. The same model shows where the two shocks compound.
A research profile of a country is not a constituted national programme. The model is operated under the authority of the programme that owns the question and its data.
Each country forms its own consortium: institutions, leaders and experts in three pillars, with its own Desk, Model and Portfolio. Six regions compare compatible evidence on the systems that cross borders.
Each country forms its own consortium with accountable counterparts: institutions, leaders and experts in three distinct pillars. GCRI provides the methods, the shared environment and the Secretariat; the country keeps its agenda and its data.
National instruments
Decides whether and how the Nexus Standards are adopted or adapted in that jurisdiction; owns the national profile, deviation register and national-language editions; nominates to the regional seats. Set by the national host and anchor institutions under national law; minimum a chair, a public-authority liaison where one exists, and members from at least three stakeholder groups (government, academia, industry, civil society, communities); no seat is sold or tied to a contribution.
How a national agenda forms
Ten programmes, each from a question to named deliverables, and a route in for every kind of institution and person. The current service level is information and enquiries.
Each starts from a question an accountable owner puts to the Consortium and ends in named deliverables. National adoption, finance and execution remain separate decisions of the competent authority.
GCRI's platforms share fields with the Forum's and the Alliance's. Trace a field across the three institutions, then follow the work into the Standards it is written against, the courses that teach it and the Reports that publish it.
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RegistryOpen
The identifiers, schemas and conformance tests every GCRI method and dataset is written against.
Learning22 courses open
Courses in the methods behind GCRI's work, from hydrology and epidemiology to model validation.
EvidenceCorrections open
Where GCRI's findings, failures and corrections become citable, versioned evidence.
The Index is the Consortium's indexing system for risk data. Every indicator, hazard, series and country profile carries its Nexus Standards identifier, its source and its licence, so what this page shows can be traced, corrected and reused.
Every country profile carries the source and licence of each value. Correct a value or reply
Open layers on an equal-area hexagon grid, shown as densities per km² or as symbols: People · GHSL 2025People · WorldPop 2025Built-up areaPortsAirportsRoadsRailwaysRivers and lake centrelines
/api/v1/public/grix · https://nexustandards.com/uni/{uni}
Developers · Data · Made with Natural Earth, Public domain; GHSL and WorldPop, CC BY 4.0
Snapshot of the Index registries pinned 2026-10-23 · 22c6eed. Research and risk-analytics information: not a rating, an official classification, a warning, a benchmark or advice.
The Secretariat confirms the right route, the scope of useful work and the conditions for any further step. An enquiry receives a reference; it does not create membership, an appointment or a service contract.
Start from who you are, answer an open call, or form and lead a competence cell on The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation.
Ministries, statistics offices and agencies: a national desk and chapter, and a seat in the working groups. National chapters
Operators, regulators, banks, insurers and professional bodies whose work touches systemic risk. Participate
Draft, review and adopt the methods and data standards with the working groups. Working groups
Universities, civil society and individual experts: projects, data and review. Write to the team
| Open call | Seeks | Closes |
|---|---|---|
| Founding call for experts to the working groups CALL-FOUNDING-EXPERTS | expert, editor, chair | 2026-12-15 |
| Open nomination for the three independent expert seats of the Global Standards Council CALL-GSC-IND | council-member | 2026-12-01 |
| Nominations of interim regional members (applies only if the transitional provision is decided) CALL-GSC-REG | council-member | 2026-12-15 |
| Review of the wave-1 risk core outlines (C1, C2, C3, C4, C8, C10, C11) CALL-REVIEW-WAVE1 | contributor | 2027-01-31 |
| Experts for the core standards of risk science: uncertainty and evidence grading, scales, structured expert judgement, tolerability, extremes and compound events, catastrophic and existential risk, ethics and equity, units and measurement (NRS-C17 to NRS-C24) CALL-CORE-SCIENCE | expert, editor, chair | 2027-01-31 |
| Independent reviewers for the families of the hazard atlas, three from at least two regions for each family (NHS2-R19), priority families first CALL-ATLAS-REVIEW | expert | 2027-03-31 |
| Members of the interim Frontier Safety Review Panel and red-team reviewers (biosafety and biosecurity, AI safety and security, critical-infrastructure security); applications treated in confidence CALL-FRONTIER-SAFETY-REVIEW | expert | 2026-11-30 |
| Experts in ontology, metrology, software verification and conformity assessment for the requirement register, the NHS-2 machine representation, the conformance test suites and the conformity assessment scheme CALL-CONFORMANCE-ONTOLOGY | expert, editor | 2027-01-31 |
Calls past their closing date are hidden automatically. Every call, proposal and route: open areas and calls.
Three to seven people with complementary skills in The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation: data, field practice, policy, communication.
Write to the team with the cell's name, members, area and region; you receive a reference and a contact. Write to the team
Research and evidence, data and maps, standards review, or community preparedness.
Shared study paths on the Risk Academy, with practice and certificates of completion. Hazards and resilience
Hold regular sessions, publish what the cell learns through Reports, and bring findings to the working groups. Working groups
A CERT prepares its neighbourhood for the hazards it faces: a local hazard profile from this platform's map, household and street preparedness, first aid and light search training through recognised local providers, and drills. A CERT works alongside the local emergency services and follows their direction; it never replaces them and is not an emergency service.
Open risk profiles for 195 countries, with sources and licences on every value. Open the Index
Correct a value or reply for your country; the change is logged with its effect. Open the Index
Offer a dataset; it enters through the licence gate with your credit. Open the Index
Layers, profiles and tiles through the open API. Open the Index
Docs · Learn · Standards
Suggested learning, open for review.
Faculty of Systems and Nexus StudiesRisk Academy course catalogue