The Global Risks Forum (GRF)
GRF · Capital Nexus
Capital-related institutional dialogue focused on risk-informed investment policy and public-good readiness, not finance execution. Capital Nexus is an established platform of The Global Risks Forum.
The platform does not set standards. It reads its evidence against the frameworks that competent bodies have adopted, so a finding can be placed where a decision-maker already works.
| Framework or standard | Body | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries | IMF and World Bank | Debt-carrying capacity, risk of debt distress ratings, thresholds and stress tests that guide borrowing and concessional lending decisions |
| Sovereign Risk and Debt Sustainability Framework for market-access countries | IMF | Risk-based assessment of sovereign stress over near, medium and long horizons for countries with market access |
| Addis Ababa Action Agenda | United Nations, Third International Conference on Financing for Development | Global framework for financing sustainable development across domestic, international, public and private resources, debt and systemic issues |
| Common Framework for Debt Treatments beyond the DSSI | G20 and Paris Club | Procedure for coordinated public creditor treatment of eligible countries' debt, with comparability of treatment for other creditors |
| Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability framework | PEFA Secretariat and partners | Indicators and scoring for public financial management performance, from budget credibility to external audit |
| Public Investment Management Assessment, including Climate-PIMA | IMF | Diagnostic of the institutions that plan, allocate and implement public investment, with a module on climate-sensitive practice |
| Recommendation of the Council on Budgetary Governance | OECD | Principles for budget frameworks, fiscal objectives, capital planning, transparency, parliamentary scrutiny and fiscal risk management |
| Basel III framework | Basel Committee on Banking Supervision | Capital, leverage and liquidity standards for internationally active banks, the context in which sovereign exposures and bank lending are regulated |
| Principles on Promoting Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing | UNCTAD | Shared responsibilities of lenders and borrowers on authority, due diligence, transparency, debt management and restructuring |
| Sustainable Development Goal 17 and its finance targets | United Nations | Targets on domestic resource mobilisation, development assistance (ODA), debt sustainability and policy coherence |
The screen a team would use to follow this field: its measures, states and decisions. Names are examples and values are illustrative.
Member state A · Budget cycle 3
| Coastal road upgrade | Transport | High risk | Redo | Appraisal |
| District hospital | Health | Medium | Done | Committee |
| Irrigation scheme | Agriculture | Medium | Done | Financing |
| Solar mini-grids | Energy | Low | Done | Procurement |
Public investment and capital allocation principles.
TopicRisk evidence and decision rights.
TopicInstitutional enabling conditions.
TopicDisclosure, mandates and safeguards.
TopicRoles, oversight and conflicts.
TopicDistributional outcomes and access.
TopicNational evidence requirements.
TopicSafeguards for sponsorship and support.
Three families of instruments side by side against the baseline, each with its own lag and adoption speed, under the coverage and compliance you set; effect sizes are teaching values to replace with evidence. Scenario: named assumptions about the future, not a forecast. The map on this page shows Latin America and the Caribbean; the model itself is not tied to a place.
Controls
Readouts
| Year | Baseline | Regulation | Economic incentive | Information and capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 100.0 | 99.5 | 98.8 | 99.1 |
| 1 | 102.0 | 101.2 | 100.1 | 99.8 |
| 2 | 104.0 | 102.5 | 101.1 | 99.9 |
| 3 | 106.1 | 103.5 | 101.6 | 100.0 |
| 4 | 108.2 | 103.7 | 101.8 | 100.7 |
| 5 | 110.4 | 103.2 | 101.7 | 102.1 |
| 6 | 112.6 | 102.0 | 101.6 | 103.9 |
| 7 | 114.9 | 100.4 | 101.6 | 105.9 |
| 8 | 117.2 | 99.2 | 102.1 | 108.0 |
| 9 | 119.5 | 98.6 | 102.9 | 110.1 |
| 10 | 121.9 | 98.9 | 104.2 | 112.3 |
| 11 | 124.3 | 99.7 | 105.7 | 114.5 |
| 12 | 126.8 | 101.1 | 107.4 | 116.8 |
| 13 | 129.4 | 102.7 | 109.4 | 119.2 |
| 14 | 131.9 | 104.5 | 111.4 | 121.6 |
| 15 | 134.6 | 106.5 | 113.5 | 124.0 |
| 16 | 137.3 | 108.5 | 115.7 | 126.5 |
| 17 | 140.0 | 110.7 | 118.0 | 129.0 |
| 18 | 142.8 | 112.9 | 120.4 | 131.6 |
| 19 | 145.7 | 115.1 | 122.8 | 134.2 |
| 20 | 148.6 | 117.4 | 125.2 | 136.9 |
The model runs on the teaching values set by the controls. To calibrate it for a place, read it against these admitted layers and series, which this page's map can draw:
Across the six pillars, led by Nexus Consortium
Capital Nexus studies the governance of capital for public purpose: how sovereign borrowing, public investment, development finance and financial stability arrangements are mandated, agreed, overseen and held to account. Its pages set out the institutions, frameworks, evidence and decision rights for each part of that system, with every indicator labelled by its evidence. It is a space for institutional dialogue, not for finance execution, and nothing on it is investment advice.
Debt sustainability analysis, debt transparency, debt management strategy and the frameworks for treatment and restructuring.
Planning, appraisal, selection, execution and maintenance of public capital, and the institutions assessed by PIMA and PEFA.
Multilateral and public development banks, concessional windows, public flows and the capital rules that bound them.
Macroprudential policy, bank capital standards and the transmission of shocks between banks, markets and sovereigns.
Disclosure standards, supervisory mandates, taxonomies, climate fund commitments and environmental and social safeguards.
Risk layering, contingent credit, insurance pools, payment pause clauses and the decision rights that release funds.
Financial inclusion, fiscal incidence and the distributional effects of debt service, adjustment and crises.
Partnerships, guarantees, blended finance and sponsorship, with the safeguards that keep fiscal risk and accountability visible.
The steps an instrument takes from mandate to evaluation, each with the pillar that runs it, and the decisions that stay with the authority. Teaching model with stated illustrative values, not a prediction. The map on this page shows Latin America and the Caribbean; the model itself is not tied to a place.
Across the six pillars, led by Nexus Consortium
Public finance governance is the set of mandates, rules, agreements and oversight through which sovereign borrowing, public investment, development finance and financial stability arrangements are decided and held to account. Capital Nexus, Global Risks Forum's platform for it, sets out the institutions, frameworks and decision rights involved and gives no investment advice.
Policy economists; development experts; public institutions; finance governance researchers.
Finance-policy synthesis; risk-informed capital governance; disclosure learning.
Capital governance briefs; resilience finance dialogues.
Assembled from the Nexus Standards area profile Disaster and climate risk finance: the hazards it names, the systems and communities that carry the loss, the controls and institutions that dampen it and the data that observe it. Pick an initiating event and step through the cascade to see where mandates meet and which decisions fall to whom. The Map view places the run on an example geography with open data. Every weight is a stated assumption. An exercise for dialogue, not a forecast, an assessment or a position. To model a place of your own choosing, open the full System Builder.
Hazards
Systems and couplings
Controls
NS-0 Constitution and principlesNS-3 Risk record UNIs (grammar, legacy crosswalk, allocation authority)NS-9 Contextual UNIs (deployments, instances, programme instances)NS-10 Policies and clauses (machine-readable obligations: definition, binding, evaluation and enforcement)NS-11 Verification and monitoring (evidence, attestations, zero-trust conformance observation)NS-14 Conformance and crosswalk to external standardsNRS-F8 Parametric and index-based risk transferNRS-F7 Disaster risk finance and pre-arranged financeNRS-H113 Hazard family: Financial-system fragility (NHS-1 soc.financial-system)NRS-H114 Hazard family: Macroeconomic and fiscal shocks (NHS-1 soc.macro-fiscal)NRS-D1 Risk-informed development and project screeningNRS-H28 Hazard family: Climate-state shifts (NHS-1 eco.climate-state)Observation
Example geography
Countries most exposed to climate, disaster and economic shocks often face the highest cost of capital and the least room in their public budgets. Investment that would reduce risk, such as resilient infrastructure, early warning or social protection, competes with immediate needs, and its benefits are hard to price because they are losses that do not happen. Private investors meet the same risks through credit, insurance and asset values, often without the evidence or mandate to act on them.
Failures in capital governance cascade. A disaster raises spending and cuts revenue at once, pushing up borrowing costs and crowding out the investment that would have reduced the next loss. Poorly governed public investment can create contingent liabilities that surface in a crisis. Disclosure without decision rights can produce information nobody uses, and safeguards applied late can stop a project or harm the people it was meant to serve. The distribution of gains and losses shapes trust in institutions, and with it the ability to act next time.
These are questions of institutions as much as markets: who decides, on what evidence, under which mandate and with what accountability. That is the ground of Capital Nexus, which brings together the public and private institutions concerned so that they can compare approaches and examine evidence in a neutral setting.
Why now: the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville (2025) set a new agenda for development finance, and debt service pressure limits what many exposed countries can invest in resilience. Capital Nexus convenes the public institutions that govern borrowing, investment and disclosure, and passes finance-readiness questions to Global Risks Alliance (GRA); it never executes, arranges or advises on finance.
The instruments, mandates, actors and accountability arrangements a policymaker, diplomat or development agency works with, citing the agreements that set them. Structures follow the frameworks named. Any state or progress drawn is illustrative, not a record.
The Sustainable Development Goals and targets that outcomes on Capital Nexus are reported against.
| Goal | Target | How this subject links |
|---|---|---|
| Goal 1, no poverty | Target 1.5, resilience of the poor and vulnerable | Outcomes reported through the agreed indicator of the target |
| Goal 17, partnerships for the goals | Target 17.4, long-term debt sustainability | Outcomes reported through the agreed indicator of the target |
| Goal 10, reduced inequalities | Target 10.5, regulation and monitoring of financial markets | Outcomes reported through the agreed indicator of the target |
| Goal 16, peace, justice and strong institutions | Target 16.6, effective, accountable and transparent institutions | Outcomes reported through the agreed indicator of the target |
How a commitment on Capital Nexus is traced from adoption to review, country by country.
| Country (example) | Commitment | National instrument | Budget line | Indicator reported | Review |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Country A | In place | In place | In preparation | In preparation | No record |
| Country B | In place | In preparation | In preparation | No record | No record |
| Country C | In preparation | No record | No record | No record | No record |
Capital Nexus is designed for policy economists, development experts, public institutions and finance governance researchers. Its methods are finance-policy synthesis, risk-informed capital governance and learning from disclosure practice.
Concise analysis of a governance question, with sources, options and their limits.
Structured dialogues that start from a stated question and end with a published record.
Comparative study of what disclosure regimes reveal, and what they leave out.
GRF convenes and governs programmes. It does not regulate, finance, procure or certify, and hosting or sponsorship confers no authority over findings. Capital Nexus never selects, recommends, arranges or approves an investment.
Night lights, population density and flood water over Latin America and the Caribbean, from NASA GIBS. Each layer carries its own date.
The interactive map needs JavaScript; the layer list and sources are below.
Layers 3
Activity and exposure, for this page
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
Loading the latest NASA imagery.
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.
Activity and exposure, framed on Latin America and the Caribbean.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date. They are indicators, not assessments of any place.
Layers and dates
The platform draws on three canonical methods in the STEM Commons: economics and development economics, financial economics and macro-finance and policy, institutional and decision science. Their use here is described on the STEM foundation of Capital Nexus. The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI) supplies research through Economic Development.
Global Risks Alliance (GRA) builds shared industry understanding of the same subjects as a business league, never as an adviser or arranger. Its counterparts include Development Finance Nexus, Sovereign Capital Nexus, Public Finance and Sovereign Debt, Disaster Risk Finance, Financial Stability and Banking Nexus. The full list is on counterparts across the Consortium.
Every claim on Capital Nexus rests on methods with a canonical page in the STEM Commons, so readers can see what a finding depends on and where its limits lie.
A question becomes evidence, a governed build, an organised community, a controlled test, a reviewed publication and, finally, a decision taken by the competent authority under its own rules.
Each step of the cycle in the pillar it runs in; the decision stays with the competent authority, outside the programme.
Capital Nexus works through six pillars of one annual programme, led by the Nexus Consortium, with GCRI, GRF and GRA each contributing in its role: explore, experiment and prototype in Labs, build, simulate and prepare in Foundry, convene and test in Universe, codify, correct and apply in Nexus Standards, publish in every format in Reports, teach in the open in Risk Academy.
Programme yearAll phases
Route
The whole programme
Every pillar hands its work to another; together they close the year's feedback loops.
L · F · U · S · R · A
and 14 more
GCRI studies a field as science, GRF governs it and GRA builds shared financial understanding of it. Capital Nexus links to its counterparts so that work on one side is visible on the others.
Reports is the Consortium's quarterly publication. What you know about this subject can become evidence, a case or a correction in the next edition, credited to you and published under CC BY 4.0 where it is your own work.
Never send personal data, sensitive infrastructure detail or anything you have no right to share. A contribution is reviewed before use; sending it confers no authorship or editorial rights, and sponsorship never buys a finding.
Choose a view and press Play to follow the platform's process, its programme year, the standards it applies and how its findings are published. The outline shows how the work is designed to run, not the status of any decision.
Capital Nexus
Platforms · Programme year · Standards · Reports
A platform joins a field to named methods, labelled evidence and the outputs it publishes, without becoming the authority it serves.
Capital Nexus home · Platforms · Shared methodsAn outline of how the work is designed to run; it does not report the status of any decision or record.
Start from who you are. Answer an open call. Or form and lead a competence cell on the Capital Nexus platform.
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 Capital Nexus. Participate
Courses and practice, with a record of every course completed. Free to study. Open learning
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.
Bring together three to seven people with complementary skills: data, field practice, policy and 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
Pick one focus: research and evidence, data and maps, standards review, or community preparedness.
Follow shared study paths at Risk Academy, with practice and a record of every course completed. Hazards and resilience
Hold regular sessions. Publish what the cell learns through Reports. Bring findings to the working groups. Working groups
What a national team or a local community can do on The Global Risks Index (NXS-GRX) today.
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
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.
Information and enquiries are open today. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.
Maps, data and figures on this site are shown for context and general information. They are not advice, forecasts or warnings; the limits of the information are set out in the Disclaimers and Data Notices.
Our articles, maps and twins are free to read and free to republish. Readers and partners keep it that way.
GRF is a not-for-profit institution. To ask who funds a piece of work, use the funding questions form.
Editors and the expert reviewers named on each article decide what we publish. Funders and partners do not review or approve articles before publication.
Articles: CC BY 4.0. Figures, maps, twins and data: CC BY 4.0. Other uses: ask through the permissions form.