Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience across North America

North American cities are increasingly exposed to climate-related hazards that do not occur in isolation. Extreme heat, drought, flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, wildfire smoke, and sea-level rise interact with aging infrastructure, uneven urbanization, social vulnerability, and fragmented governance systems. As a result, an initial climate shock can trigger cascading failures across energy, water, transport, telecommunications, housing, health, and emergency response systems. This article develops a conceptual and comparative framework for understanding compound and cascading climate risks in urban systems, with a focus on cities in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It argues that urban climate risk cannot be understood through single-hazard or sectoral approaches alone. Instead, cities must be analyzed as socio-technical systems in which infrastructure interdependence, governance arrangements, fiscal capacity, and social inequality shape the scale and distribution of climate impacts. Drawing on selected urban cases, including Los Angeles and New Orleans in the United States, Toronto and Vancouver in Canada, and Mexico City, Monterrey, Acapulco, and Veracruz–Boca del Río in Mexico, the article identifies common patterns and differentiated challenges in North American urban resilience. The reviewed evidence identifies a mismatch between the complexity of cascading risks and the fragmented governance and funding mechanisms available to manage them, although its form and severity vary across national and urban contexts. The article concludes that strengthening urban resilience in North America requires moving from isolated adaptation measures toward integrated risk governance, stable resilience financing, intersectoral metropolitan coordination, and equity-centered infrastructure planning. Stronger disaster-response networks, interagency cooperation, and urban-resilience institutions can support more coordinated preparedness and recovery from climate-related disasters with the potential for severe human, infrastructural, and economic impacts.