A Water Corridor Runs. Now the Councils Argue Who Owns the Tap.

GENEVA — The engineering question is largely settled; the political one has barely opened. With transfer corridors now delivering to districts that queued dry two summers ago, delegates convened by the Global Concordat Council spent this week arguing not over pipes but over accountability — who sets the meter, who answers when it fails, who owns the line that runs through a sovereign district it did not build. Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen, who chaired July's emergency water session, told the assembly the corridors had "bought time, not trust." The tension is concrete: a utility headquartered in one megacity can now switch on, or price, the water of a household a thousand kilometers away, and the Concordat has no settled law for that leverage. Halvorsen's staff circulated no draft, only a warning that infrastructure outran governance. "We built the artery first," one delegate said. "We are writing the rules for it afterward, in public, under pressure." The corridor's success, in short, is now its hardest problem.