Reservoirs Slip as the Concordat's Water Session Enters Its Second Week

GENEVA — The emergency water session that the Global Concordat Council opened on 22 July is now in its second week, and the reservoirs the delegates are arguing over have not waited for them. The Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly reported this week that three of the basins feeding the session's agenda — in the American Southwest, the Iberian interior and northern India — are drawing down faster than any July on record. "We are negotiating an allocation for water we can already see leaving," said Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen at the session's midpoint, declining to predict an outcome. For a world of roughly twelve billion at a mean anomaly of plus two-point-eight degrees, the arithmetic is unforgiving: demand rising, storage falling, and no agreement yet on who yields first. In Almería, farmer Rosa Belmonte has cut her irrigation days from five a week to two. "They talk in Geneva," she said. "The well answers here."