The Floor Is Not the Same as the Water

The Concordat's ministers did an honest thing this week: they set a floor. Every person, they agreed, is owed a guaranteed minimum of water, and pledged to widen the corridors carrying it to more than 108 million people now on the move. I do not want to diminish that. A floor is a moral achievement, and the delegates who fought for it in Geneva deserve the credit. But I write to name the gap that the applause is papering over. A floor is a number on paper; the water is a quantity in a reservoir, and this summer the second has been falling faster than the first can be guaranteed. You cannot allocate liters that the lake no longer holds. The session's real work was not the floor but the corridor-capacity pledge behind it, and that pledge is only as good as the supply it draws from. The honest sentence the communiqué did not print is this one: a right to water is not the same as water. We have written the promise. We have not yet found the liters to keep it.