We Named the Migrants a Number. Now Name the Corridor.

There is a particular comfort in a rising number. Past 124 million registered climate migrants, we can nod at the scale and feel we have understood something, when in fact the figure lets us look away from every corridor it aggregates. The summit in Valencia produced a real accord and a real question shouted from the plaza — who reads the meter? — and the second is more urgent than the first. A guaranteed water floor that no named person is accountable to enforce is a floor made of paper. The Concordat's Ingrid Halvorsen has promised a public corridor ombudsman by year's end; that promise, and not the tonnage of the vote, is the thing to hold. Institutions like Hearth Relief and the Passage Trust do the unfunded work of turning a statistic back into households. We owe them, at minimum, the specificity we deny the migrants when we round them to a hundred and twenty-four million. Name the auditor. Name the corridor. Numbers do not keep promises; people do.