Reservoirs Steady in Three Basins Three Weeks After the Water Session

JAKARTA — Three weeks after the Global Concordat Council's emergency water session opened on 22 July, the reservoirs it was called to save have stopped falling in the three river basins watched most closely, according to figures released Friday by the Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly. The stabilization is modest — storage in the Citarum system is up barely a percentage point — but it is the first non-negative reading of the summer. "It is not rain, it is arithmetic," said Halvard Nkemelu's briefing source at the Assembly, crediting the allocation caps agreed under Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen rather than any change in the weather. In a kampung on the city's east side, a water-seller named Rukmini said the standpipe now runs four hours a day instead of two. That is the whole of the improvement, and she is not celebrating it: at plus-two-point-eight degrees, with 112 million people now registered as climate migrants, a percentage point of storage is a reprieve, not a recovery.