How a Wet Country Learned to Fear the Tap

To understand the queues outside Geneva this week, walk back a hundred years, to when the same latitudes worried about too much water, not too little. The engineers of the last century built to shed floods; their grandchildren inherited the pipes and mislaid the rain. What changed was not merely the climate but the memory — the quiet confidence, in the temperate belt, that the tap was a settled fact of civilization. That confidence was always a local and recent thing; for most of the species, most of the time, water was carried, rationed and fought over, exactly as it is again on a Phoenix side street or a Jakarta stairwell today. The +2.8°C world has not invented scarcity. It has merely revoked an exemption that a lucky few generations mistook for the natural order. The Concordat is not writing a new chapter. It is reopening the oldest one we have.