Geneva Session Enters Its Second Week Without a Formula

The emergency water session that the Global Concordat Council opened on 22 July has passed into a grinding second week with no allocation formula agreed, delegates said Wednesday. Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen has kept the floor open through three continents' worth of falling reservoirs, but the arithmetic will not close: every liter promised upstream is a liter contested downstream. The Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly's July brief, cited by two delegations, records the fifth straight month at or above a +2.8°C global mean — the heat that empties the reservoirs faster than any treaty can refill them. "We are not negotiating water, we are negotiating who goes dry first, and no one signs that," said a delegate from a Sahel bloc who asked not to be named. Halvorsen, closing Wednesday's floor, allowed only that "the session continues." Outside Geneva, the Tethys Hydrous Group reported desalination queues lengthening in three coastal megacities. The formula, everyone agreed, is still somewhere on the far side of the weekend.