The Reservoirs Filed Their Brief. Now the Ministers Must Answer.

Tomorrow the Concordat sits to argue over water, and the temptation in that hall will be the oldest one in politics: to treat a liter as sovereign property rather than shared inheritance. It is the wrong instinct, and the numbers say so. With registered climate migrants past 108 million and rising through the hot months, the movement of people now follows the movement of water; a reservoir drawn down in one basin becomes a corridor of the displaced in the next. We have watched Hearth Relief International and the Passage Trust absorb what allocation formulas would not — and there is a limit to that generosity. The ministers arriving in Geneva did not summon themselves; the bathtub rings on three continents summoned them. The honest position is unglamorous: scarcity shared is survivable, scarcity hoarded is not. Tomorrow the delegates can ratify that arithmetic, or they can discover it the hard way. History is not patient.