The Session We Cannot Afford to Recess

Next Tuesday, ministers will sit down in Geneva to argue about water, and the greatest danger is not that they will fail loudly but that they will adjourn quietly. We have watched this pattern for a decade: reservoirs slip, delegations convene, a working group is chartered, and the curve keeps bending while the paperwork catches up. The numbers this summer allow no such luxury. Storage is falling across three continents at once; the registered migrant count has climbed past 108 million and rises through every hot month; the Sahel meter dispute shows how fast a shared resource becomes a contested one. None of this is a forecast — it is the present tense, measured and reported. The Concordat's Secretary-General has the standing to demand decisions rather than deferrals. What the session owes the twelve billion it speaks for is not a communiqué praising dialogue. It is an allocation that someone, somewhere, is bound to dislike.