Four Days After the Session, a Reservoir Keeps Falling

Four days after the Concordat's emergency water session closed on Monday, the line that matters to Ana Bustos has not moved: the intake tower at Lake Mead, outside Las Vegas, now stands in water she can measure by the meter of exposed rock. Bustos, a reservoir monitor for the Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly, has watched the surface drop through a heat summer that pushed the global mean anomaly to a fifth straight month at or above +2.8 degrees Celsius. "The ministers agreed on a survival floor," she said, standing on a boat ramp that ends fifty meters above the shoreline. "The lake did not attend the meeting." The Assembly reports storage across three continents slipping below the margins that held last year, with the same corridors carrying the same thin supply to more than 108 million registered migrants now moving through the hot months. The communiqué guarantees a floor of liters per person. What it does not guarantee, Bustos noted, is that the reservoir behind her will still hold them by autumn.