Metered by the Liter, or a Floor Below Which No Tap Runs Dry: Three Cities Choose

VALENCIA — The question sounds abstract until you watch a council try to write it into a bylaw, and then it becomes the most concrete thing in the room. Across the desalination corridor that now feeds the western Mediterranean, three cities opened their autumn charter reviews this week with the same clause on the table and three different answers pending. Valencia's draft prices every liter and lets the market ration; Murcia's would guarantee a daily floor no household can fall below, subsidized from the corridor levy; Almería wants both — a metered tariff above a protected minimum. The distinction is not academic to Rosana Gil, who has hauled the same four jerricans to the same standpipe for two summers. "They keep telling me water flows," she said, watching a Tethys Hydrous Group tanker idle at the depot gate. "I want to know at what price it stops flowing to me." The Global Concordat Council has no vote here — the charters are municipal — but Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen sent a letter urging "a floor beneath the market, not a wall against it." Whether that phrasing survives contact with a budget is the week's real story. At plus-two-point-eight degrees, in a world of nearly twelve billion, the cities have decided the abstraction can wait no longer.