WP-41, Planetary Triage, §1, puts 2,270 million people at imminent risk across six regions, prices full relocation at US$230–690 trillion, and records the verdict in three words: receiving capacity does not exist. Global urban infrastructure, it says, cannot absorb this. Data
The cost arithmetic is sound and the conclusion that full relocation exceeds twice global annual GDP in perpetuity follows from it. The capacity claim is different in kind. It is an empirical statement about the world's ability to receive people, it carries no measurement, and it was made without consulting the one apparatus that measures exactly that.
| Figure, 2025 | Value |
|---|---|
| International tourist arrivals, worldwide | 1.52 billion |
| Change on 2024 | +4% (~60m) |
| Europe alone | 793 million |
| Africa, growth — fastest of any region | +8% |
| Middle East, against 2019 | +39% |
| International tourism receipts | US$1.9 trillion |
| Total export revenues from tourism | US$2.2 trillion |
Every one of those 1.52 billion people was housed, fed, given water, given sanitation, and moved through a transport system, in a country not their own. The system that did it is not a proposal. It ran last year, it is running now, and it grew 4%.
The Tourism Satellite Account is the statistical framework by which countries measure exactly this — arrivals, bed-nights, accommodation stock, seasonal load, and the economic flows attached. It is not a trade-body estimate; it is a standard adopted through the UN statistical system, and dozens of countries compile it annually. A capacity ledger for receiving human beings exists, is standardised, and is published. It has simply never been read by anyone asking WP-41's question.
A tourist is not a resettled person, and a chapter that glided over the difference would deserve to be thrown out. Five disanalogies, each of which weakens the claim:
None of those five rescues the original sentence. They change what the sentence should have said.
Receiving capacity does not exist is not established and, on the physical reading, is contradicted by an annual figure of 1.52 billion border crossings absorbed without system failure. What is true is narrower and more useful: the physical capacity to house and service large transient populations demonstrably exists and is measured; the binding constraints are duration, livelihood, financing and political consent, none of which is a capacity constraint at all. WP-41 reached the right conclusion about full relocation through a cost argument that stands on its own. The capacity claim was surplus, unmeasured, and should be withdrawn.
The difference is not pedantic. “It cannot be done” ends an inquiry. “The physical part is measured and the binding constraints are these four” names four things to work on, and puts a number on the first.
Chapters 1 to 3 each found a quantity that is not published: what share of output is promised, what instrument holds an object, what the aid ledger looks like recomputed. This chapter found the opposite and it is worth naming as its own class.
It is not collected — the encumbrance ratio, the custody instrument. Or it is collected for another purpose, under another name, by people who do not know they answer the question. The second is worse, because it looks like absence, and the honest verdict of “nobody knows” is available to anyone who does not go looking. WP-41 said a thing did not exist; UN Tourism had counted it.
The operational rule: before asserting that a quantity is unmeasured, name the industry that would have to measure it for its own reasons. Transport, insurance, logistics, hospitality and telecoms between them hold most of the world's physical-capacity data, and none of them publishes it under the name a policy question uses.
Arrivals also measure something this volume has needed since it began: a country's weight is not its output, and the Chamber's seating argument has been conducted without a way to say so quantitatively.
A state that hosts tens of millions of foreign nationals a year, anchors a currency corridor, carries a diaspora, or sets standards a region follows exercises reach that its GDP does not report. Mexico is the clearest case — a top-ten destination by arrivals, a very large diaspora, one of the world's largest remittance corridors, and $2.12tn of output that leaves it outside a six-chair table. Australia is the mirror: modest inbound numbers, and regional anchorage across the Pacific that no arrivals figure captures.
A reach index would be built from components that are each separately published:
| Component | What it captures | Source status |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound arrivals / resident population | How much of the world a country physically hosts | published annually |
| Diaspora abroad / resident population | How much of itself sits elsewhere | published, uneven |
| Remittance corridor volume, both directions | Household-level dependency, in and out | published |
| States whose trade policy is written with reference to it | Bloc centrality | constructible |
| Visa-free access granted and received | Asymmetry of admission | published |
No country's reach index is calculated in this chapter and no ranking is asserted. The components above are named because each is separately published and nobody has combined them; the weighting is the hard part and is not proposed. Stating that Mexico or Australia “has more reach than its GDP suggests” without the arithmetic would be the same defect this volume exists to catch. Open