The Global Risks Forum (GRF)
GRF · Policy Nexus
Policy analysis, institutional capacity and cross-border learning focused on consequential shared risks. Policy Nexus is an established platform of The Global Risks Forum.
Many of the risks that matter most today do not respect the boundaries of ministries, mandates or states. A drought becomes a food, energy, health and migration problem. A new technology raises questions for competition, security, labour and rights at once. A pandemic tests health systems, public finances, supply chains and public trust together. Policy, by contrast, is usually made in separate portfolios, on separate timetables, with separate evidence and accountability.
Policy science has a well-established account of why this is hard. Benefits of prevention are uncertain and delayed while costs are immediate; responsibilities are fragmented so that no single body owns a cross-cutting risk; information is unevenly distributed; and the actors who must cooperate often have different incentives. Coordination failures are therefore common even when everyone agrees a risk is serious. Implementation adds further gaps, as policies designed centrally meet local capacity limits and unforeseen behaviour.
When policy fails on a shared risk, the consequences cascade across sectors and borders. Unmanaged exposure in one place becomes a cost in another; a regulatory gap in one jurisdiction becomes a channel for risk into others. The field exists to help institutions see these connections, compare how others have responded and learn what works in practice.
Why now: much of 2026's policy agenda is implementation, from national plans under the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to the amended International Health Regulations in force since September 2025. Policy Nexus compares how jurisdictions assign and carry these duties, convenes the institutions concerned, and records options and dissent; reviewed comparisons can inform country and regional editions of Reports.
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 · Session 3
| A · guidance only | 39 | Low | Mixed | High |
| B · duty with standards | 61 | Medium | Positive | Medium |
| C · duty, standards, funding | 76 | High | Positive | Low |
Risk across government decisions.
TopicPrevention and national strategies.
TopicClimate, nature and public planning.
TopicAI, biotechnology and innovation.
TopicResilience and wellbeing.
TopicEquity and economic transformation.
TopicCooperation on basins, grids and corridors.
TopicFrom policy designs to monitored outcomes.
TopicInstitutions, social inclusion and development policy.
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 Africa; 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
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 |
|---|---|---|
| OECD Recommendation on Regulatory Policy and Governance | OECD Council | Whole-of-government regulatory policy: impact assessment, stakeholder engagement, ex post review and regulatory oversight bodies |
| OECD Recommendation on the Governance of Critical Risks | OECD Council | National strategies for critical risks, all-hazards assessment, risk-informed investment, transparency and cross-border cooperation |
| IRGC risk governance framework | International Risk Governance Center, EPFL | Phases of pre-assessment, appraisal, characterisation, management and communication, distinguishing simple, complex, uncertain and ambiguous risks |
| Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction | UNDRR, endorsed by the UN General Assembly | Priorities and global targets for understanding, governing and investing in disaster risk reduction, reported through the Sendai Framework Monitor |
| Open Government Partnership national action plans | Open Government Partnership | Co-created government commitments on transparency, participation and accountability, assessed by the Independent Reporting Mechanism |
| Regulatory impact assessment guidance | OECD, European Commission Better Regulation guidelines and national cabinet offices | How the problem, options, costs, benefits, distributional effects and consultation of a proposed rule are assessed and published |
| Sustainable Development Goal 16 | United Nations | Targets and indicators for effective, accountable and inclusive institutions, access to justice and responsive, participatory decision-making |
| Paris Agreement transparency and adaptation provisions | UNFCCC | Nationally determined contributions, national adaptation plans and reporting under the Enhanced Transparency Framework |
| International Health Regulations | World Health Organization | Obligations on States Parties for core public health capacities, event notification and annual self-assessment reporting |
| ISO 31000 Risk management guidelines | International Organization for Standardization | Principles, framework and process for managing risk in organisations, public bodies included |
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 Africa; the model itself is not tied to a place.
Across the six pillars, led by Nexus Consortium
Risk-informed public policy is policy that brings evidence about hazards, exposure, vulnerability and systemic interdependence into budgets, regulation, investment and planning, with clear ownership in government. Policy Nexus, Global Risks Forum's platform for it, covers disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, technology, health and social protection, cross-border cooperation, implementation and inclusive development.
Policy advisers; institutional analysts; international cooperation teams; public administration researchers.
Policy comparison; public consultation; option analysis.
Policy primers; comparative institutional briefs; dialogue records.
Assembled from the Nexus Standards area profile Political and governance risk standards: 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.
Systems and couplings
Controls
NS-0 Constitution and principlesNS-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)NRS-H112 Hazard family: Governance and institutional failure (NHS-1 soc.governance)NRS-U9 Universe platform profile: Financial Regulation NexusNRS-H59 Hazard family: Economic shocks and governance failure (NHS-1 soc.economic)NRS-H118 Hazard family: Organised crime and illicit economies (NHS-1 soc.crime)NRS-A5 Built-in licensing and rightsNRS-U24 Universe platform profile: Policy NexusObservation
Policy Nexus produces policy primers, comparative institutional briefs and dialogue records. Its methods are policy comparison, public consultation and option analysis. It serves the people who advise on and implement policy, and the researchers who study public institutions, by providing a neutral place to compare approaches and test options.
Comparative analysis of laws, mandates, instruments and outcomes across jurisdictions, with their context stated.
Structured option analysis that sets out consequences, uncertainty and who bears costs, without recommending a choice.
Policy dialogues and consultations where public servants and experts exchange experience under agreed rules. See policy dialogues.
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 kinds of instrument available on Policy Nexus, by level of government and cooperation.
| Instrument type | Local | National | Regional | Global |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regulatory | Zoning, building codes | Laws, standards, licensing | Harmonised rules | Conventions and treaties |
| Economic | Local levies, grants | Budget lines, taxes, insurance schemes | Risk pools, regional funds | Financing mechanisms |
| Information | Local warnings | Disclosure, early warning, statistics | Data sharing arrangements | Global monitoring and reporting |
| Institutional | Local committees | Lead agencies, coordination councils | Regional bodies and secretariats | Multilateral mandates |
| Cooperative | Community agreements | Partnership compacts | Memoranda and joint programmes | Agreements and joint commitments |
How commitments on Policy Nexus are held to account, from commitment to correction.
Policy Nexus stewards policy, institutional and decision science and game theory and mechanism design in the STEM Commons, and applies causal inference and impact evaluation and decision analysis under uncertainty; see the STEM foundation. Two chapters develop specialist lines: geoeconomic and trade governance and inclusive development governance.
Population density, night lights and flood water over Africa, from NASA GIBS. Each layer carries its own date.
The interactive map needs JavaScript; the layer list and sources are below.
Layers 3
People and hazards, 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.
People and hazards, framed on Africa.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date. They are indicators, not assessments of any place.
Layers and dates
Policy Nexus studies how public institutions decide about shared and consequential risks: how mandates are assigned, how rules are made and assessed, how agreements across borders are negotiated and kept, and how policy designs become monitored outcomes. Its pages set out the governance mechanisms through which policy risk develops and spreads, the measures of policy capacity and regulatory quality, the public records behind them, and the institutions that hold each decision, with every measure labelled by its evidence.
How governments bring risk evidence into budgets, regulation, planning and investment, and who at the centre of government owns it.
National and local strategies, legal mandates and prevention budgets under the Sendai Framework, and how their implementation is monitored.
Climate laws, adaptation plans, nationally determined contributions and how climate risk enters spatial and sectoral planning.
Rules, standards and supervisory institutions for artificial intelligence, biotechnology and other emerging technologies.
Health security obligations, social protection systems and the institutions that sustain wellbeing through shocks.
Treaties, joint bodies and data sharing on shared river basins, interconnected grids and trade and transport corridors.
How policies are delivered, monitored, audited and evaluated, and how the lessons return to the next decision.
Participation, representation, accountability and the institutional conditions under which development policy reaches excluded groups.
Every claim on Policy 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.
Policy Nexus works through six pillars of one annual programme, led by the Nexus Consortium, with the Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI), GRF and the Global Risks Alliance (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. Policy 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.
Policy 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.
Policy 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 Policy 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 Policy 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.
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