The Canada hub and North America’s shared risks: how cooperation is organized from Toronto

Canada, the United States and Mexico share one grid, shared waters, continental supply chains and wildfire smoke. This page explains how the Nexus Consortium organizes cooperation on those shared risks from Toronto, and what the Canada hub does and does not do.

Key takeaways

• The Canada hub is one of two planned coordination roles in the North America programme of the Nexus Consortium, beside a United States hub that also covers Mexico; neither is an office, and no hub host decision is yet on record [1].
• Toronto already holds a recorded function: the Consortium Secretariat, held there by The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI) through GCRI Canada, which keeps the programme’s records, calendars, decision logs and source registers and routes enquiries to regional and country desks [2].
• North America is one coupled system: one reliability organization covers the United States, Canada and part of Mexico, and the 2023 Canadian wildfires raised annual fine-particle pollution across the United States and exposed 354 million people in North America and Europe to their smoke [3, 4].
• Losses are rising faster than shared evidence: Canada’s insured severe-weather losses reached a record C$8.5 billion in 2024, more than double 2023 [5, 6].
• The hub’s work is to make evidence compatible across borders on five shared systems, without merging national data or authority; every decision stays with the competent public authority, operator or financial institution.

What the Canada hub is

The Canada hub is a planned regional coordination role of the Nexus Consortium, the public-good programme through which The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI), The Global Risks Forum (GRF) and The Global Risks Alliance (GRA) help countries examine interconnected risk with shared methods. It sits in the North America programme region, one of six programme regions, alongside a planned United States hub. The Canada hub’s stated focus is national adaptation, sovereign compute, Indigenous and Arctic interfaces, infrastructure and North American coordination; the United States hub covers the United States and Mexico, with federal, state, Tribal and territorial interfaces, power, digital infrastructure, hazard resilience and supply chains [1].

A planned hub is a coordination role, not an operational site, an office or an exclusive territory. It operates only once its host decision is on record, and today none is: the region is in formation, and the programme’s current service level is R0, information and enquiries [1, 7]. What Toronto does hold on record is distinct from the hub. The Consortium Secretariat sits with GCRI Canada in Toronto, Ontario: it coordinates the integrated programme, keeps its records, calendars, decision logs and source registers, and routes correspondence to the regional and country desks. GCRI Canada is also the programme’s single global contracting party [2].

Three things are therefore kept apart on this page, as they are in the programme’s records: the Secretariat seat (recorded, in Toronto), the Canada hub (planned, a regional coordination role) and the Canada Nexus Consortium (a named national programme in formation). Each has its own record and its own state, and none implies the others.

Why North America needs shared risk evidence

North American risk does not respect the border, because the systems that carry it do not. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation sets and enforces reliability standards for the bulk power system across the United States, Canada and part of Mexico [3]. In 2025 Canada exported 32.7 TWh of electricity to the United States and imported 22.1 TWh [8]. When that system fails, it fails across jurisdictions: the August 2003 blackout cut power to about 50 million people and 61,800 MW of load in Ontario and eight US states [9]. Goods move the same way. US goods trade with Canada was about US$715.5 billion in 2025 and with Mexico about US$871.6 billion, much of it in integrated manufacturing supply chains that cross borders several times before a product is finished [10].

Hazards travel along the same paths. The 2023 Canadian wildfire season burned more than 14.6 million hectares and forced more than 230,000 people from their homes [11, 12]. Its smoke added 1.49 µg/m³ to annual mean fine-particle (PM2.5) pollution across the United States, four times the contribution of that year’s US-origin fires, and exposed 354 million people in North America and Europe to daily PM2.5 pollution [4]. The 2025 season was the second worst on record, with more than 8.3 million hectares burned and more than 85,000 people evacuated [13]. In November 2021, atmospheric-river floods in British Columbia caused C$675 million in insured losses and halted rail to the Port of Vancouver, and wheat carloadings fell 49.6% in the month [14, 15]. The Great Lakes, shared by two countries, hold 84% of North America’s surface fresh water and supply a basin of more than 30 million people [16]. The Arctic, which frames Canada’s North and Alaska, has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979 [17].

The financial system now registers these shocks first. Canada’s insured severe-weather losses were more than C$3.1 billion in 2023, a record C$8.5 billion in 2024 and more than C$2.4 billion in 2025 [6, 5, 18]. In the United States, NOAA counted 27 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2024, at US$182.7 billion; the agency has since stopped updating that series, so a public baseline the region relied on has ended [19, 20]. Each institution sees its own slice of these losses. Interdependent systems turn local failures into regional ones (Rinaldi, Peerenboom and Kelly, 2001), and the evidence that would show the whole chain is scattered across agencies, operators and two or three national statistical systems [21]. That is the gap regional cooperation in the programme is designed to close.

Why coupling changes the risk calculus

Three bodies of evidence explain why North American risk has to be examined as a coupled system rather than hazard by hazard. First, infrastructures depend on one another in four distinct ways: physically, when one system’s output is another’s input; through information and control systems; geographically, when assets share a corridor or a floodplain; and logically, through markets, regulation and policy [21]. A grid intertie, a rail corridor to a port and a shared water intake each combine several of these at once. Second, interdependent networks are more fragile than isolated ones: a failure in one can trigger failures in the other, and beyond a threshold the joint system collapses abruptly rather than degrading gradually [22].

Third, the hazards themselves increasingly arrive together. Compound events, combinations of drivers and hazards such as heat, drought and fire, or storm surge with river flooding, account for a large share of climate impacts, and assessments that treat hazards singly underestimate the risk [23]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds with high confidence that multiple climate hazards will occur simultaneously and that climatic and non-climatic risks will interact, compounding overall risk and cascading across sectors and regions [24]. Distinguishing compound, interconnected, interacting and cascading risk is not semantic: each calls for different evidence, different owners and different responses [25].

For a region whose grids, waters and supply chains are integrated across borders, the implication is direct. National risk assessments, however rigorous, see only the part of a cascade that falls inside their jurisdiction. The North America programme exists to make the cross-border part visible, with methods compatible enough that each country can test the same question on its own data and reach its own conclusion.


Figure 1. Arc widths are proportional within each measure: electricity in TWh, goods trade in US dollars. The boreal fire belt is schematic, not a burned-area map. [8, 10, 16, 11, 4, 1]

Five shared systems the region examines

Regional work in the programme starts from shared systems, not from institutions. The North America programme names five, each with the question it examines [1]. The cross-border risk systems page sets the rule for all of them: shared-system work compares governed outputs and preserves dissent; it creates no treaty, no transfer of sovereignty and no right to move data.

The five shared systems of the North America programme and the question each examines, as recorded on 21 October 2026, with the public evidence that shows why each matters.


Figure 2. Each box is a separately measured effect, with its own source; the arrows show the order of the cascade, not a modelled causal weight. [11, 12, 4, 14, 15]


Figure 3. A digital twin on Copernicus GLO-30 elevation and NASA Landsat imagery, with the layers a flood moves through drawn apart for reading. Vertical relief is exaggerated three times; feature locations are approximate. A teaching view, not a flood map. [14, 15]

Three levels of cooperation, one rule of subsidiarity

The programme organizes cooperation at three levels, and each level decides only what cannot be decided below it. At the national level, a National Nexus programme belongs to its country. Its National Nexus Consortium (NNC) is the institutional pillar, where institutions take part through six constituency councils: state and public authorities; industry and operators; academia and research; civil society and media; community and Indigenous institutions; and a cross-cutting pathway for financial institutions and regulators. A National Leadership Council (NLC) brings personal leadership seats, and National Working Groups (NWG) carry the technical work. A National Desk collects material questions, capability gaps and candidate missions.

At the regional level, Regional Nexus Consortiums compare compatible evidence on shared systems and support the regional profiles of Nexus Reports, which never override a country’s own findings. The two North America hubs are coordination roles at this level. At the global level, the Consortium Secretariat in Toronto keeps the programme’s records; GRF leads leadership, institutional dialogue and the governance of Nexus Universe; GCRI stewards evidence and methods; and GRA reads the evidence for finance [1, 2]. The council architecture of GRF follows the same principle: a regional council takes up a question only when it crosses borders.

No regional body binds a country, and withdrawal never erases other parties’ lawful work [1]. For North America this matters more than elsewhere, because the three countries already govern their shared systems through binding instruments of their own. The programme adds compatible evidence and a neutral place to compare it; it does not add a fourth layer of authority.

What the Secretariat in Toronto holds, and what it does not

The Secretariat is the administrative and records function of the whole programme, not of North America alone. Its record set is public in outline: the programme’s calendars and decision logs, its source registers, the programme’s participation records, and the routing of every enquiry to a regional or country desk with a durable reference [2]. Its value to North American partners is practical. A ministry, a utility or a university that writes to the regional desk at northamerica@therisk.global receives a reference and the name of the next step, and the record of that exchange survives staff changes and programme years [1].

The programme states its separations as a list, and each applies here. A submitted application is not membership. A claimed identity is not representative authority. A payment is not an appointment or access to restricted data. An infrastructure offer is not an allocation. A report candidate is not a released publication. A research coverage profile is not a constituted consortium or a local office. A planned hub is not an operational site. Readiness evidence is not a financing or underwriting decision.


Figure 4. Each level takes up a question only when it cannot be settled below it; the decision stays with the competent authority, outside the programme. [1, 2]

Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

Regions in the programme describe relationships, not territory, and a country can belong to two of them. Mexico takes part in both the North America programme and the Latin America and the Caribbean programme, because its grid, water and supply chains are integrated northward while its hurricane, seismic and food-system exposure is shared southward [1, 7]. The seven Central American states and the Caribbean states are covered by the Latin America and the Caribbean programme and its planned Brazil hub, not by the Canada hub. An earlier version of this page grouped them under Toronto; that grouping is withdrawn.

The cross-regional finance lessons are among the most useful the region can share. Mexico renewed sovereign catastrophe protection through World Bank catastrophe bonds of US$420 million in April 2024 and a further US$175 million for Pacific hurricane risk in May 2024, bringing that year’s coverage to US$595 million [27, 28]. CCRIF SPC, the Caribbean’s parametric risk pool, has made 83 payouts totalling about US$500 million to its members since 2007 [29]. GRA reads such evidence for finance on its North America regional programme and its pages on insurance and public pools; it never lends, underwrites, rates or invests.

The programme year in North America

Every National Nexus programme in the region would follow one annual cycle: question, evidence, build, organize, test, publish, decide and renew, with gates G0 to G7 between the stages. National Desks bring material questions into the annual agenda at planning (G0). Evidence is assembled and made comparable through the year. In the third quarter, the Nexus Universe annual cycle tests readiness through exercises in which institutions take roles within their own mandates and operators remain responsible for their own systems; national contributions and exercises and learning explain how. Regional profiles of Nexus Reports appear in the second and fourth quarters, after review, and results and records are kept for renewal (G7).

Decision sits outside the cycle by design. After evidence is published, the competent authority, operator or financial institution decides on its own terms, and the programme records what was decided only when the decision-maker chooses to share it.


Figure 5. Gates G0 to G7 are programme decisions about the cycle, never an approval; the decide stage is taken by the competent authority outside the programme. [1]

How the region’s risks are measured

Most of the evidence the region needs already exists; the difficulty is that it is held in incompatible forms. Wildfire extent and evacuations are reported by Natural Resources Canada and Public Safety Canada [11, 13]; US disaster losses came from NOAA until that series was retired in 2025 [20]; Canadian insured losses come from industry data compiled for the Insurance Bureau of Canada [5]; grid reliability is assessed by NERC [3]; and trade flows by the US Census Bureau and Statistics Canada [10, 15]. Satellite observation from NASA services is shown on the North America region page with each layer’s own date.

The programme’s shared evidence environment organizes this work through twenty systems, each named by its Nexus Standards code. For North America the most used are NXS-GRX (canonical data, provenance and risk), NXS-DSS (decision cases and deliberation), NXS-COR (compute, nodes and runtimes), NXS-NET (network topology and continuity) and NXS-NSF (trust, authorization and assurance) [1]. The participants, agreements and handoffs between institutions are recorded in NXS-RLS (participants, agreements and handoffs), and the programme’s records and learning in NXS-HUB (knowledge, records and learning). Every record carries an evidence label, observed, modelled, scenario or estimated, so that a measured value is never presented as a model output or the reverse.


Figure 6. The two panels use separate scales and currencies and are not summed. NOAA retired its billion-dollar disaster series in May 2025, so no US figure follows 2024. [6, 5, 18, 19, 20]

Data of Figure 5. Insured severe-weather losses in Canada by year, in Canadian dollars, as published by the Insurance Bureau of Canada from CatIQ data.

The instruments that already govern shared risk

Cooperation in the region starts from instruments the countries already own. The programme aligns its evidence to them; it never substitutes for them.

Selected instruments that govern shared risk in North America, with their status as of 21 October 2026.

Standards the programme brings

The programme’s own standards are proposed, not adopted, and each country decides whether and how to use them through its National Standards Council. The Nexus Standards profile for global and systemic risk and the standards for compound and cascading hazards give the region a common vocabulary for the chains this page describes, with the risk standard NRS-C6 for systemic and cascading risk. The governance of Nexus Standards is a working model: no stakeholder group may hold more than one third of any decision, and funding never buys a seat or a vote. Risk Academy teaches the same material on systemic, compound and cascading risk.

What institutions in the region can do now

At service level R0, participation begins with a question. The routes below are open today; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.

• Governments, provinces, states and cities: send a material question on a shared system to the regional desk at northamerica@therisk.global or through the enquiry form; the reply gives a reference and the next step.
• Grid, water, transport and port operators: propose a dependency to examine, such as an intertie, a border crossing or a shared intake; operators keep full responsibility for their systems throughout.
• Universities and research institutes: bring a method, a dataset or a case through contributing to the quarterly reports, credited to you and published under CC BY 4.0 where it is your own work.
• Supervisors, insurers, banks and development lenders: read the region’s finance questions with GRA, on protection gaps and on lawful handoffs to the institutions that decide.
• Indigenous governments and community institutions: propose how a question should be framed and governed before any evidence about your lands, waters or people is gathered; consent and data sovereignty come first.

What is changing

• Compute meets the grid. Data-centre demand could reach 6.7% to 12% of US electricity by 2028, which turns compute siting into a question of grid, water and public-service continuity at once [26].
• Fire seasons as a continental hazard. The 2023 season showed that smoke is a public-health exposure for hundreds of millions of people far from the fire line [4].
• A public loss baseline has ended. With NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster series retired, the region needs other comparable and documented loss records [20].
• Supervision is pricing physical risk. Canada’s prudential regulator now expects climate risk management from the largest banks and insurers, and supervisors need evidence that crosses borders as exposures do [34].
• The Arctic as a system boundary. Rapid Arctic warming changes permafrost, coastal and northern infrastructure risk, with Indigenous governance at the centre [17].

Three faces of North American cooperation

The same regional question looks different to a scientist, a convenor and a financier, and all three are needed for a decision to hold. GCRI leads on science, methods and evidence and holds the Secretariat in Toronto; GRF leads leadership, institutional dialogue and the governance of Nexus Universe, with its regional view on regional cooperation and North America; and GRA reads the evidence for finance, insurance and development readiness. Nexus Consortiums are formed at national and regional level through their host and lead organizations, within a multilateral programme led by these three institutions, and every stage follows the Nexus cycle from question to renewal.

Boundaries. What this page does not claim: the Canada hub is a planned coordination role with no host decision on record; it is not an office, a public authority or a representative of any government, Indigenous government, city or institution. The Consortium Secretariat keeps records; it does not approve, certify, procure, finance or decide. No country in the region has a constituted national programme, and the current service level is R0. GCRI does not regulate or certify, GRF does not regulate, finance or procure, and GRA does not lend, underwrite, rate or invest. Naming an agency, instrument or organization is not a claim of partnership or endorsement.

Questions and answers

Is there a GCRI or GRF office in each North American country?

No. The Consortium Secretariat sits with GCRI Canada in Toronto. The Canada and United States hubs are planned coordination roles, not offices, and no hub host decision is yet on record.

Does the Canada hub cover Central America and the Caribbean?

No. Central American and Caribbean states are covered by the Latin America and the Caribbean programme and its planned Brazil hub. Mexico takes part in both that programme and the North America programme.

Who decides the regional agenda?

National programmes set their own agendas. Regional work compares compatible evidence on shared systems; no regional body binds a country, and withdrawal never erases other parties’ lawful work.

How is the Canada hub different from the Canada Nexus Consortium?

The Canada hub is a regional coordination role for North America. The Canada Nexus Consortium is a named national programme for Canada, in formation. Each has its own record and state, and neither implies the other.

Can a company or a bank buy a role in the regional programme?

No. Ordinary participation has no fee, funding never buys a seat or a vote, and cooperation with public bodies never depends on a membership tier. Financial institutions take part through a cross-cutting pathway that reaches every constituency without governing any.

How do I start?

Write to the regional desk at northamerica@therisk.global or use the enquiry form at therisk.global. You receive a reference and the name of the next step; today the programme offers information and enquiries only.

Glossary

• Planned hub: A regional coordination role for a group of countries; it operates only once a host decision is on record, and is never an office or an exclusive territory.
• Consortium Secretariat: The records and coordination function of the whole programme, held by GCRI Canada in Toronto.
• Shared system: Infrastructure or an ecosystem that crosses borders, such as a grid, a basin or a trade corridor, examined with compatible methods by the countries that share it.
• Service level R0: The current state of the programme: information and enquiries, with a durable reference for each enquiry.
• Subsidiarity: The rule that a question is handled at the lowest level able to handle it; a regional body takes it up only when it crosses borders.
• Protection gap: The share of economic loss from a hazard that is not insured or otherwise pre-financed.

Further reading across the network

• North America region at GCRI
• Six programme regions
• Regional cooperation at GRF
• North America at GRA
• National Nexus: how a country programme works
• Nexus Universe
• Nexus Reports
• Programme status

References

1. The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (2026). North America region. Accessed 2026-10-21.
2. The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (2026). GCRI Canada. Accessed 2026-10-21.
3. North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) (2026). Who we are. Accessed 2026-10-21.
4. Zhang et al., Nature 645, 672 (2025). Long-range PM2.5 pollution and health impacts from the 2023 Canadian wildfires. Accessed 2026-10-21.
5. Insurance Bureau of Canada (CatIQ data) (2025). 2024 shatters record for costliest year for severe weather-related losses in Canadian history at $8.5 billion. Accessed 2026-10-21.
6. Insurance Bureau of Canada (CatIQ data) (2024). Severe weather in 2023 caused over $3.1 billion in insured damage. Accessed 2026-10-21.
7. The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (2026). Six programme regions. Accessed 2026-10-21.
8. Canada Energy Regulator (2026). Market snapshot: overview of 2025 Canada-U.S. energy trade. Accessed 2026-10-21.
9. U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force (2004). Final report on the August 14, 2003 blackout in the United States and Canada: causes and recommendations. Accessed 2026-10-21.
10. U.S. Census Bureau (2026). Trade in goods with Canada (c1220) and with Mexico (c2010). Accessed 2026-10-21.
11. Natural Resources Canada (2025). Forest fires. Accessed 2026-10-21.
12. Jain et al., Nature Communications 15, 6764 (2024). Drivers and impacts of the record-breaking 2023 wildfire season in Canada. Accessed 2026-10-21.
13. Public Safety Canada (2025). Government of Canada provides update on 2025 wildfires as support continues. Accessed 2026-10-21.
14. Insurance Bureau of Canada (CatIQ data) (2022). Insured losses from 2021 floods in BC now $675 million. Accessed 2026-10-21.
15. Statistics Canada (2022). The Daily: railway carloadings, November 2021. Accessed 2026-10-21.
16. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2026). Great Lakes facts and figures. Accessed 2026-10-21.
17. Rantanen et al., Communications Earth & Environment 3, 168 (2022). The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. Accessed 2026-10-21.
18. Insurance Bureau of Canada (CatIQ data) (2026). Severe weather-related insured losses in Canada exceed $2.4 billion in 2025. Accessed 2026-10-21.
19. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (2025). Assessing the U.S. climate in 2024. Accessed 2026-10-21.
20. NOAA NESDIS (2025). Notice of changes: billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Accessed 2026-10-21.
21. Rinaldi, Peerenboom and Kelly, IEEE Control Systems Magazine 21(6) (2001). Identifying, understanding, and analyzing critical infrastructure interdependencies. Accessed 2026-10-21.
22. Buldyrev, Parshani, Paul, Stanley and Havlin, Nature 464 (2010). Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks. Accessed 2026-10-21.
23. Zscheischler et al., Nature Climate Change 8 (2018). Future climate risk from compound events. Accessed 2026-10-21.
24. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Summary for Policymakers, B.5. Accessed 2026-10-21.
25. Pescaroli and Alexander, Risk Analysis 38(11) (2018). Understanding compound, interconnected, interacting, and cascading risks: a holistic framework. Accessed 2026-10-21.
26. U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2024). DOE releases new report evaluating increase in electricity demand from data centers. Accessed 2026-10-21.
27. World Bank (2024). World Bank issues $420 million in catastrophe bonds for renewed disaster risk protection for Mexico. Accessed 2026-10-21.
28. World Bank (2024). World Bank issues $175 million in catastrophe bond for Mexico’s Pacific hurricane risk. Accessed 2026-10-21.
29. CCRIF SPC (2026). About us. Accessed 2026-10-21.
30. Government of Canada (Canada Water Agency) (2025). Canada-United States Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Accessed 2026-10-21.
31. UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015). Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. Accessed 2026-10-21.
32. Public Safety Canada (2019). Emergency Management Strategy for Canada: toward a resilient 2030. Accessed 2026-10-21.
33. Bank of Canada and OSFI (2022). Bank of Canada/OSFI pilot helps Canadian financial sector assess climate change risks. Accessed 2026-10-21.
34. Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (2023). OSFI issues new Guideline on Climate Risk Management (B-15). Accessed 2026-10-21.
35. Government of Canada (2023). Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy. Accessed 2026-10-21.
36. Government of Canada (2026). 2026 National Adaptation Strategy progress report. Accessed 2026-10-21.

Editorial record

Facts and programme states are given as of 21 October 2026. This page is reviewed at least every 180 days and whenever a hub host decision, a programme state or a cited figure changes. It replaces an earlier version of the same page, whose description of a regional headquarters, a central administrative bureau, a Geneva global coordination role, a Washington strategic role and a 2030 node did not match the programme’s current records.

Published by the GRF editorial desk under the editorial integrity policy. To report an error or request a correction, use the corrections route; corrections are dated and listed with the page.