Passage Trust Asks the Concordat to Fund the Winter It Can See Coming

GENEVA — Passage Trust brought a plain request to the Global Concordat Council this week and a blunt warning to go with it: the shelters that survived the summer will not survive the winter unfunded. The corridors were built, and financed, and defended as heat-escape routes — engineered against the wrong season. Now the same 124 million people who fled the summer are sheltering in the corridor's northern reaches as the cold comes on, in tents and prefabs designed to shed heat, not hold it. "We asked for cooling money in June and got it," Passage Trust director Marek Sobol told the Council. "We are asking for heating money in November, and we are being told to wait for a review." Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen acknowledged the gap and the awkward truth beneath it: every budget deferred the winter line because the winter was, for a while, someone else's problem. The Concordat has the mechanism — the adaptation fund approved in the spring package — but not yet the disbursement. Sobol's arithmetic was hard to argue with. "The cold does not convene a review," he said. "It simply arrives."