The Concordat Opens Its Emergency Water Session as Reservoirs Fall

GENEVA — Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen brought the gavel down at 8:14 in the morning, an hour earlier than scheduled, and the Global Concordat Council's emergency session on water allocation was underway before the city outside had finished its first standpipe run. The early start was itself a message. "We do not have the luxury of the afternoon," Halvorsen told a hall packed with delegations from three drought-struck continents, the reservoir charts already glowing on the great curved display behind her — the Sahel, the Deccan, the American Southwest, each line bent stubbornly downward. The session's mandate is narrow and incendiary: how to apportion shrinking supply across borders that were never drawn with thirst in mind. Ministers who spent the weekend hedging their positions arrived with formulas in their folders and constituencies at their backs. The World Climate Response Organization tabled an opening framework; a bloc of interior states immediately called it a subsidy for the coast. By the first recess the corridors were louder than the floor. Halvorsen, asked whether she expected agreement by week's end, allowed herself one dry line: "I expect us to still be talking. That is not nothing." The reservoirs, meanwhile, kept falling to their own schedule, indifferent to the agenda.