The Osmo Pocket 4P is starting to get more visible online as DJI is putting it into the hands of reviewers and content creators this week. That said, most of this camera is still a mystery -- and that's the way DJI wants it.

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“Future winters promise less snow, more rain. Nobody’s prepared.” So proclaims the title of a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that frames adaptation to snow loss as the “million-dollar question” facing the western United States.

Declining snowfall—and snowmelt—affects ecosystems, urban and rural water supplies, hydropower, recreation, tourism, and agriculture. As the largest sectoral consumer of fresh water globally, agriculture is particularly vulnerable to snow loss.

Much of the U.S. West faces one of the worst snow years on record, and the statistics on future conditions feel dire. Up to 40% of the water demand for agriculture in the region is likely to go unmet as it gets warmer and less snowy. Similar scenarios are shaping up elsewhere around the world, including southern Europe, high-mountain and Central Asia, western Russia, and the southern Andes [Qin et al., 2020].

In response, water managers have developed a range of approaches for adapting to snow loss: infrastructure-based approaches like managed aquifer recharge, nature-based solutions such as forest management and beaver dam analogues, demand-side approaches like multibenefit land repurposing, and polarizing supply-side approaches like reservoir expansion and cloud seeding (Figure 1).

However, efforts to identify which of these strategies to implement for different drainage basins, or watersheds, using the variety of available approaches seem to fall into one of two traps: either searching for unrealistic one-size-fits-all panaceas [Ostrom, 2007] or treating every basin as unique, which is costly and inefficient.

Importantly, continuing along this trajectory means that we’re on track to offset only about a third of global climate-induced crop yield losses by 2100. For the western United States, previous work has estimated cumulative economic losses from declining snowfall of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars while noting that rational adaptation decisions are hampered by the lack of financial analyses of the importance of snow [Sturm et al., 2017].

We thus suggest that the “trillion-dollar question” isn’t how to adapt but, rather, where existing strategies may make the most—and fastest—difference to offset projected losses. Answering this question requires an approach that matches strategies to the contexts where they are more likely to succeed—one that treats basins as neither uniform nor unique.

A Mismatch in Research and Operational Scales

Physical scientists tend to look at snow loss as a basin-scale problem, in part because this view aligns with hydrologic boundaries. However, as our colleague, applied economist Joey Blumberg, explains, “county lines were not drawn to follow watersheds, and rivers do not conform to political borders, creating a patchwork of mismatched boundaries.”

Scientists have long emphasized that mitigating climate change requires us to “think globally, assess regionally, act locally.” And in 1992, the authors of the Dublin Principles reasoned that moving the needle on “wicked water problems” requires targeting decisionmaking at the “lowest appropriate level,” where stakeholders can collaborate most effectively.

The challenge is that “local” isn’t a single, consistent unit. We recently explored the lowest appropriate level concept for agricultural water management in the U.S. West by defining local operational contexts on the basis of intermediaries such as irrigation districts, water conservancies, and mutual water companies that connect individual farmers to their hydrology [Gordon et al., 2024].

Working at this scale, we found one-size-fits-all strategies often don’t hold up, even within the same hydrologic basin [Gordon et al., 2024; Boisramé et al., 2026]. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, for example, expanding reservoir storage could buffer agriculture in northeastern Utah against declining snowpack, but the same strategy may fail miles away in southwestern Wyoming, where a thirstier atmosphere may make it harder to refill existing reservoirs.

However, collecting detailed local-scale information for just 13 of the roughly 2,600 operational contexts nationwide took almost 3 years of searching websites, reading working papers, and calling water managers.

Scaling this approach across the entire western United States is understandably overwhelming. We need a more systematic approach to help managers identify which strategies could work most effectively, and where.

A Diagnostic for Agriculture and Snow Loss

Ostrom [2007] argued that complex systems, such as Western agriculture, “are partially decomposable in their structure.” This insight is woven into archetype analysis, an approach for identifying recurrent patterns across otherwise diverse systems.

Like workplace assessments—which are genuinely useful, albeit imperfect, tools for understanding successful management styles—archetypes draw on qualitative, quantitative, or hybrid approaches to group diverse operational contexts on the basis of shared characteristics [Sietz et al., 2019]. These groupings enable systematic knowledge transfer about, for example, how management strategies that work in one context can also guide adaptation elsewhere.

“Researchers can empirically derive building blocks or components that comprise archetypes to represent key features of a system,” explains Elizabeth Koebele, who studies urban water sustainability [Garcia et al., 2019] and has begun applying archetypes in that context. However, she notes, these building blocks “vary based on the system context, available data, and study goal.”

We propose three main characteristics that interact to define operational contexts in snow-dependent agriculture in the western United States: physical constraints, governance systems, and human behavior. Physical constraints, including biophysical setting, infrastructure, and climate, determine available water supplies. Governance capacity relative to governance complexity shapes how those supplies are allocated across competing uses. Human behaviors influence both water demand and how users respond to supply conditions and governance rules.

Using these characteristics to establish archetypes of water management contexts could define a path forward for operationalizing an approach to accelerate successful adaptations to declining snowpacks in the West.

Constraining How Snowmelt Becomes Water Supply

Physical constraints stem from biophysical processes that influence how, when, and how much snow becomes streamflow; infrastructure that stores and conveys water; and hydrologic and climatic uncertainties about future supplies. These constraints can vary substantially from basin to basin.

Consider the Walker River Basin and California’s San Joaquin Valley, both of which rely on Sierra Nevada snowpack but have different biophysical settings. In some parts of the central Sierra, forest management can reduce wildfire risk and increase streamflow by up to 14% during low-snow years. Elsewhere, however, water made available by forest management may be consumed by remaining vegetation, limiting downstream gains.

These biophysical differences interact with uses of built infrastructure, including irrigation systems, reservoir outlets, and canals, to determine how and when water is stored and released. As temperatures warm and snowmelt declines, officials in both the Walker River and San Joaquin Valley basins must increasingly manage for a wider range of extremes, including “cold-water droughts.” However, the infrastructure to manage these trade-offs through reservoir storage and operations that balance agricultural deliveries with aquatic habitat needs is more developed in the highly managed San Joaquin than in the Walker.

Layered on top of biophysical and infrastructural constraints are climatic and hydrological uncertainties, such as whether snow loss will lead to more evapotranspiration and less streamflow. These uncertainties complicate management decisions based on cost-benefit modeling of individual strategies: Should districts expand reservoir storage if precipitation is predicted to increase or decrease depending on the model? Frameworks like Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty emphasize the need to select strategies that are robust across many possible futures.

Thankfully, measuring physical constraints on snowmelt at basin scales—a means, along with improved modeling, to reduce hydroclimatic uncertainties—is becoming more feasible today with newly developed tools. Water managers can turn, for example, to databases like the U.S. Geological Survey’s ResOpsUS [Steyaert et al., 2022], which catalogs historical reservoir operations across the contiguous United States, and to publicly available hydrologic projections such as those from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Coupled Models Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) ensemble.

Governance Controls Supply Allocations

We frame governance around capacity and complexity. Capacity in this context is the ability of stakeholders “to mobilize resources in order to make equitable and fair decisions around shared challenges,” according to governance scholar Gina Gilson. Complexity refers to the number and intricacy of jurisdictions, authorities, regulations, and stakeholders involved. As governance complexity increases, the effectiveness of adaptation strategies becomes more sensitive to capacity constraints, particularly regarding timescales and funding.

For example, infrastructure in the Walker is controlled locally by a single water district, and jurisdictional coordination involves two states and the Walker River Paiute Tribe. Coordination on water management is never simple, but fewer jurisdictions generally means faster decisionmaking and clearer authority, allowing the single water district to implement strategies like multibenefit land repurposing more readily. Such implementations, in turn, enable reduced agricultural water use, directly supporting restoration of Walker Lake and recovery of endangered species.

The San Joaquin Valley is vastly different in scale and complexity, covering eight California counties, one of which alone has 22 water districts and seven cities. Following the passage of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, water users in the basin formed more than 120 groundwater sustainability agencies. Agricultural water management thus involves overlapping federal and state systems that operate under different rules, contracts, and regulatory requirements. While land repurposing programs can be implemented, more substantial capacity, time, and resources are typically needed to do so.

Emerging efforts like the Western States Water Data Access and Analysis Tool (WestDAAT) and the Harmonized Database of Western U.S. Water Rights make it easier to assess governance in a basin by standardizing data about rules, regulations, and water rights across states. Combined with mapping of irrigation service areas and water transfers [Siddik et al., 2023], these resources help stakeholders identify the jurisdictions involved, how authority is distributed, and what coordination mechanisms exist for agricultural water management.

Human Behavior Shapes Demand Responses

Once snowmelt reaches water users, behavioral dynamics—how people respond to crises, policies, and changing conditions—determine how effectively management strategies achieve desired results.

Water demand is influenced by consumption choices and by economic, political, and cultural factors. It is also influenced by factors that typical hydrologic models rarely account for, including social structure, social memory, and affluence. More affluent users are less likely to modify their behavior to reduce water use under conditions of scarcity.

The dynamics of water demand in the South Platte River Basin, for example, are especially complex, as they are balanced across cities, agriculture, and ecosystems across parts of Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Water prices in the basin’s Big Thompson project, a federal water diversion system in northern Colorado, jumped from $1,500 per acre-foot in 1990 to more than $30,000 in 2018, driven by economic factors that resulted in cities owning 70% of water originally intended for agriculture.

Even with reliable projections of future climate and water supply, carefully planned strategies can be overwhelmed by economic and behavioral factors, resulting in transfers and reallocations of water. What’s more, behavioral responses to adaptation strategies can paradoxically increase demand when users perceive that scarcity problems are solved.

The “reservoir effect” occurs when water security perceptions encourage expansion of water-intensive activities [Di Baldassarre et al., 2018]. Similarly, the irrigation efficiency paradox shows how efficiency gains can lead to expanded production and reduced return flows (how much irrigation water returns to streams and aquifers) downstream [Grafton et al., 2018].

Conceptual frameworks, models, and global case studies have all been used as approaches to study the effects of human behavior on hydrology. With sufficient training data, we believe tools like machine learning could be used to further explore how behaviors influence adaptation and to anticipate shifts as snow loss continues.

Archetypes in Practice

By evaluating how physical factors, governance systems, and human behavior shape outcomes across places like the Walker, South Platte, and San Joaquin basins, researchers and practitioners can establish archetypes to help identify patterns in what strategies are most effective in different places and assess how to transfer lessons from one setting to another (Figure 2).

The Walker River Basin exemplifies an archetype common to agriculturally dominated headwaters in the western United States with low governance complexity (few jurisdictions), adequate capacity (resources), low behavioral complexity (more predictable and unified user groups), and substantial physical constraints (significant future snow loss and limited infrastructure for water storage and supplementation).

With this profile, the Walker is an ideal testing ground for evaluating how effectively different strategies offset changes in snowmelt. Does cloud seeding increase snowpack? Could beaver dam analogues—a nature-based solution reminiscent of Idaho Fish and Game’s mid-20th century effort to parachute beavers into the wilderness—meaningfully increase water retention? Could multibenefit land repurposing buffer people and ecosystems against supply volatility while restoring ecosystem functionality?

The value of organizing operational contexts by archetypes is that each context need not be treated as unique. Lessons learned from the Walker could be systematically transferred to other areas with similar characteristics and could be incrementally tested in others.

The South Platte has physical constraints similar to Walker’s but features greater governance complexity because of multiple interstate compacts, as well as greater behavioral complexity. Modeling analyses indicate that demand-side strategies could adapt to more volatile water supply in the South Platte [Gharib et al., 2023]. But implementing them requires balancing perspectives from both agricultural and urban water users—a behavioral dynamic absent in Walker.

Crop switching to cultivate higher-value crops on less acreage could reduce water use. However, options for what crops can be grown where are constrained by factors like elevation and climate. Even where feasible, new crops would require investments in education, new infrastructure, risk management, and agronomic knowledge.

Through iterative expansion and testing, broad archetypes like “high behavioral complexity” could be specified to reflect dynamics like rural-urban competition or concerns around buy-and-dry economics. Archetypes may also point to contexts where governance complexity signals that decisionmaking is occurring above the lowest appropriate level.

The San Joaquin, with its extremely complex governance involving numerous local, state, and federal agencies managing surface and groundwater, is one potential example. Recognizing this pattern can help identify where substantial resources and long timelines may be required to implement programs (e.g., LandFlex) requiring legislative authorization, multiagency coordination, and stakeholder engagement. It may also signal the need to identify smaller operational contexts within larger settings so implementations proceed more rapidly.

Operationalizing Archetypes from Diagnosis to Action

Developing a systematic approach to match adaptation strategies with areas where they are most likely to succeed in operation is only a first step. Applying diagnostics without mechanisms to implement new strategies is often insufficient to drive timely action.

An instructive precedent of success in water quality management comes from the 1970s. By then, pollution controls on factories had improved compared with the early 20th century, yet water quality in surface waters across the country still declined because of pollution in agricultural runoff. The breakthrough came with the EPA’s total maximum daily load (TMDL) program, which created a structured process that set measurable goals for reducing pollution and assigned responsibility for meeting those goals to the sources of the pollution, allowing for local control over adaptation.

Archetypes could play a similar role in facilitating beneficial snow-loss adaptations, and a structure like the TMDL program could start by assessing supply-demand risks across operational areas, setting performance targets such as reservoir reliability and shortage frequency, and then using the diagnostic to identify which strategies fit each archetype. Results and lessons could be shared region-wide, while implementation would remain locally driven.

This suggestion is, emphatically, not a prescription for specific policy mechanisms. But it serves as a reminder that—just as few of us engage with workplace assessments or change behavior on the basis of their results without organizational support—archetypes will need to be paired with implementation structures to translate diagnosis into action.

Beyond Silver Bullets

Nearly 20 years ago, Ostrom [2007] warned against seeking panaceas for complex environmental problems. There is no silver bullet for snow loss or single answer to our trillion-dollar question, but one path forward for sustaining complex Western ecosystems lies in developing archetypes of different types of basins.

A small irrigation district, for example, wouldn’t need to independently test every strategy in Figure 1 or develop complex decision support tools when a similar archetype already evaluated which strategies work under comparable governance, behavioral, and physical conditions.

Critically, these archetypes can be developed and refined by managers and scientists to capture more nuanced realities. Physically constrained systems, for example, could include areas facing high future uncertainty or limited reservoir flexibility. Governance and behavioral dimensions could likewise evolve to represent contexts where subsidies lead to incoherent incentives or where cultural norms link water use to local identities and traditions.

Like workplace assessments, the goal isn’t to diminish unique personalities but to work with them more strategically. Archetypes can show where we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to adapt and where the wheel might need to be tweaked. By leveraging collective knowledge and learning across regions facing similar challenges, rather than crafting new solutions basin by basin, we can reduce the time and resources needed to implement equitable and sustainable adaptation solutions.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants 1828902 and OIA-2148788. Where We Live is funded by a grant from NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) RII Track-2 program and features partnerships across the University of Idaho (award 2316126); the University of Nevada, Reno (award 2316127); and the University of South Carolina (award 2316128). Work was also supported by internal funds from the Division of Hydrologic Resources at the Desert Research Institute.

References

Boisramé, G. F., et al. (2026), Think globally, model locally: Complex responses of agricultural water supplies to different climate projections, J. Am. Water Resour. Assoc., 62(3), e70117, https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.70117.

Di Baldassarre, G., et al. (2018), Water shortages worsened by reservoir effects, Nat. Sustainability, 1(11), 617–622, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0159-0.

Garcia, M., et al. (2019), Towards urban water sustainability: Analyzing management transitions in Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, Global Environ. Change, 58, 101967, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.101967.

Gharib, A. A., et al. (2023), Assessment of vulnerability to water shortage in semi-arid river basins: The value of demand reduction and storage capacity, Sci. Total Environ., 871, 161964, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161964.

Gordon, B. L., et al. (2024), The essential role of local context in shaping risk and risk reduction strategies for snowmelt‐dependent irrigated agriculture, Earth’s Future, 12(6), e2024EF004577, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF004577.

Grafton, R. Q., et al. (2018), The paradox of irrigation efficiency, Science, 361(6404), 748–750, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat9314.

Ostrom, E. (2007), A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 104(39), 15,181–15,187, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702288104.

Qin, Y., et al. (2020), Agricultural risks from changing snowmelt, Nat. Clim. Change, 10, 459–465, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0746-8.

Siddik, M. A. B., et al. (2023), Interbasin water transfers in the United States and Canada, Sci. Data, 10, 27, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-01935-4.

Sietz, D., et al. (2019), Archetype analysis in sustainability research: Methodological portfolio and analytical frontiers, Ecol. Soc., 24(3), 34, www.jstor.org/stable/26796999.

Steyaert, J. C., et al. (2022), ResOpsUS, a dataset of historical reservoir operations in the contiguous United States, Sci. Data, 9, 34, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01134-7.

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Author Information

Beatrice L. Gordon (beatrice.gordon@dri.edu), Gabrielle F. S. Boisrame, Christine M. Albano, and Rosemary W. H. Carroll, Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nev.; and Adrian A. Harpold, University of Nevada, Reno

Citation: Gordon, B. L., G. F. S. Boisrame, C. M. Albano, R. W. H. Carroll, and A. A. Harpold (2026), Archetypes could accelerate agricultural adaptation to less snowpack, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260184. Published on 9 June 2026.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s).

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

There was a moment, somewhere around 1990, when I sincerely believed that the most important thing my mother did each evening was sit down at 9.00pm sharp to watch the news.

Not 9.01pm. Not 8.59pm. Nine, on the dot, because that was when the news began, because Sir Alastair Burnet had decided it was so, and because the rest of the United Kingdom, including, by the look of it, the entire cabinet, appeared to be doing exactly the same thing. The country ran on a single national rhythm, like a great wheezing grandfather clock, and the people who set the time wore tailored suits and lived in a place called Wood Lane.

That rhythm is now thoroughly, demonstrably, embarrassingly dead. And the people doing the burying are not bedroom-bound teenagers in TikTok-stained pyjamas. They are the very figures who built the broadcast schedule in the first place.

Take Stephen Colbert. Forty-eight hours after CBS finally smothered The Late Show with a corporate pillow, the network insists this had nothing to do with the lawsuit, the Skydance merger or the present occupant of the Oval Office, and we are of course expected to accept that assertion at the value of a Liz Truss lettuce, Colbert popped up on a public-access channel called Monroe Community Media. Then he popped up, rather more pointedly, on his shiny new YouTube channel, with Eminem and Jeff Daniels in tow, gathering 120,000 subscribers in a single weekend. No 11.35pm slot. No commercial break. No procession of Affiliate Sales stations of the cross. Just Stephen, a camera, and the most generous tip jar in the history of broadcasting.

A few months earlier, Piers Morgan walked off the Murdoch reservation entirely, to which I would normally raise a single languid eyebrow, but the man left a reported £50 million on the table to do it. He has called the TalkTV slot a “straitjacket”. He has 3.6 million YouTube subscribers and a four-year arrangement that hands him ownership of his own brand. Trump, Zelensky, Peterson, Ronaldo: all interviewed not for the dignified British 10 o’clock viewer but for a global congregation that watches him in Brisbane, Boston and bed.

And while the talent is bolting for the exits, the institutions are quietly digging tunnels under the perimeter fence. The BBC, that great, lumbering, well-meaning monument to the licence fee, is putting the finishing touches on a landmark deal to produce original shows for YouTube. Why? Because, mortifyingly, YouTube has overtaken BBC One on monthly reach in this country. The corporation that gave us Reith, Attenborough and Bake Off is now obliged to commission content for the same platform that hosts cats falling off skirting boards. The licence fee, it turns out, doesn’t beat free.

The numbers, for those of us who still pretend to be grown-ups, are devastating. Per Ofcom’s Media Nations 2025 report, Britons aged 16 to 24 now watch a startling 33 minutes of broadcast television a day, of which barely 20 minutes is live; they spend an hour and a half on YouTube and TikTok. For someone over 75, broadcast still hoovers up 90 per cent of in-home viewing. For a 16-year-old, it is 19 per cent. We are not, as is so often claimed, watching the gradual decline of an industry. We are watching its will being read.

Across the Atlantic, Nielsen’s Gauge confirms YouTube has now spent six consecutive months as the single largest distributor of television in America, larger than Disney, larger than NBCUniversal, larger than the entire stricken cable bundle put together. YouTube earned $36 billion in ad revenue in 2024, more than all four American broadcast networks combined. The schedule, to put it baldly, has been replaced by the search bar. The time slot has been replaced by the thumbnail.

The business lesson here is not “everyone should start a YouTube channel”. Please don’t. You’ll fail, embarrass your spouse and spend Saturdays editing in your shed. The lesson, for those of us building businesses outside the M25 commentary bubble, is rather more important than that. Ownership, distribution and audience relationship are now the three things that actually count, and the platform that delivers all three at once is winning. Witness Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger Ventures putting capital into creator-led media businesses precisely because the old playbook, make show, hand to broadcaster, hope, is demonstrably worse than the new one. The talent keeps the IP. The talent keeps the audience. The talent, increasingly, is the broadcaster.

The slot, that great totem of the 20th-century media baron, was never about the viewer. It was about logistics, advert breaks, satellite uplinks, union breaks, Carol Vorderman’s hairdresser. The viewer wanted the show. They never wanted nine o’clock. And now, at last, they don’t have to take both.

Sir Alastair Burnet, sleep well.

Read more:
Goodbye 11.35pm: Why linear TV’s biggest names are all fleeing to YouTube

By Sringatin & MICROLAB

MICROLAB Collective’s latest book, What We Carry, Under the Same Sky, features essays, poems, photographs and drawings by Indonesian migrant workers, reflecting on their life journeys from their home villages in Indonesia to Hong Kong.

This collaborative effort involved not only migrant workers but also academics who helped sharpen their writing, as well as artists who guided the process and helped design the book’s layout.

Their stories represent the journeys of hundreds of thousands of domestic workers in Hong Kong and beyond.

The shared collective emotion begins in Chapter One. Despite living in resource-rich Indonesia, the authors describe facing economic difficulties due to the country’s broken system. “It is true, our country is rich, yet we do not live in prosperity,” they write.

Each chapter touches upon the invisible burdens faced by migrant workers, such as long-distance motherhood and structural isolation. It opens with an essay, followed by photos taken by migrant workers. The pictures are their personal reflections of what they have “carried,” metaphorically and literally, from Indonesia to Hong Kong, during work and on their days off.

The photos are accompanied by captions that describe the burdens of their lives, worries, and hopes as migrant workers.

A poignant example is in Chapter Two. A migrant worker uses a photo of suitcases in front of airport check-in counters to express loneliness, longing and determination. “Leaving behind family, children, parents – we store our feelings of longing, pain, discrimination in a suitcase of sincerity,” she wrote.

The stories shared by 15 women in the book can easily be experienced by many other migrant workers. This could be seen during the book launch on International Women’s Day on March 8.

The authors drew much laughter when they told the audience about experiencing miscommunications and misunderstandings when they first came to Hong Kong. For example, they mistook the Cantonese word “tang” for “chair,” whereas the employer meant “wait” or “lamp.” The writers turned to humour to ease the daily struggles and sadness they may experience.

Reading What We Carry, Under the Same Sky is like watching a TV drama. It begins with reflections on their home country, then continues with the challenges they face overseas, personal moments with friends on their days off, and ends with their dreams and aspirations.

The book also captures the bitter reality of a cycle of exploitation. Even though Hong Kong and Indonesian laws are said to protect migrant workers, they fail to change the fundamental well-being and status of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong.

The laws and regulations often contrast with the realities faced by migrant domestic workers. While smartphone technology makes it easier for migrant workers to communicate and send money home, their living conditions remain the same.

The mandatory live-in policy forces migrant domestic workers to live with their employers.  It is not uncommon for them to sleep in the kitchen, in the bathroom, or in a coffin-sized compartment. There is no legal limit to their working hours, and many work for over 12 hours a day and are on call 24/7.

The rules often become a trap. The two-week immigration rule for migrant workers forces them to leave Hong Kong within 14 days after their contract is terminated. As a result, many workers are afraid to report abuse for fear of being immediately deported and losing their livelihood.

There is a statutory monthly minimum wage for migrant domestic workers, but in reality, their hourly wage is far below that of other Hong Kong workers and has not kept pace with the high cost of living and inflation.

Indonesia also prohibits employment agencies from charging migrant workers placement fees, while Hong Kong only allows agencies to deduct at most 10 per cent from workers’ first-month salaries. But in practice, some workers have to spend their entire wages for four to five months to pay agencies HK$ 20,000 to HK$25,000 in placement fees.

The language used by the governments often contrasts with reality.

The Hong Kong government still calls migrant workers “foreign domestic helpers” – a term that minimises their contribution as “help” rather than work. “Helper” erases the importance of the labour of migrant domestic workers and their significant contribution to Hong Kong’s economy and the households that employ them.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian government praises migrant domestic workers as “remittance heroes.” However, for many workers, it covers up the reality of being treated as commodities.

What We Carry, Under the Same Sky reveals that behind those beautiful terms and high-rise buildings in Hong Kong, these migrant women carry burdens, sweat and tears. Their stories are repeated and remain the same from year to year, decade to decade.

On International Domestic Workers Day, which falls on June 16, we encourage people and governments in Hong Kong and Indonesia to appreciate and celebrate the deep commitment of migrant domestic workers who leave their own families to take care of other families.

While this is a mutually beneficial relationship, migrant workers deserve deep appreciation, respect, and understanding of their rights, sacrifices, and struggles.

Without migrant domestic workers, employers will find it impossible to have both a career and take care of their children and elderly parents.

The responsibility of looking after others’ children, parents and home has been borne by invisible workers, often called “maids,” “servants,” or “helpers.” Yet they are more. They are workers who deserve respect, as well as fair and just treatment.

Sringatin is an Indonesian migrant domestic worker and labour activist in Hong Kong. She is the secretary of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union (IMWU) and spokesperson for the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB). In 2014, she was named by the South China Morning Post as one of the Top 10 Local Heroes.

MICROLAB is a shared space to cultivate collaboration between grassroots migrants, academics, artists and service providers hosted in the Department of English and Communication at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It is collaboratively run by the Network of Indonesian Migrant Workers (JBMI) leaders Sringatin and Jepy, Professor Lydia Catedral, Francis Catedral, Yvonne Zhu and Yuyan Liang.

It’s doubly exciting to see that Chief Executive John Lee is launching a public consultation for Hong Kong’s inaugural five-year plan.

The first reason for excitement is that we’ve just experienced a pretty well-run public consultation; the recently updated Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan generated a lot of submissions from NGOs, companies, and members of the public.

The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) seems to have done a good job of taking those submissions into account. In short, we’ve seen a proof of concept that public consultations seem to be effective.

The second reason for excitement is that China takes sustainability quite seriously in both word and deed. In aligning with China, the Hong Kong government has a golden opportunity to step up its sustainability game.

The outline of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan is 83 pages long. However, just as a very rough indicator of how seriously the topic is taken, Article 1, Chapter 1, Section 1 includes several comments about the energy transition and pollution.

Sustainability is considered important enough a topic to warrant some space in the prime real estate of those first few paragraphs, rubbing shoulders with big hitters like GDP and life expectancy. 

It might not be very scientific to measure a topic’s importance by which paragraph it lies in, but it is incredibly refreshing to see sustainability topics getting headline treatment instead of being tucked away on page 18.

In a similar vein, the top number in the Key Indicators of Economic and Social Development is GDP. However, in that very same table, there are binding objectives for carbon intensity goals, PM2.5 levels, and forest cover.

I get the sense that these are not just handwaved in order to hit a game of buzzword bingo – something that corporations are frequently guilty of. Rigorous thought has been put into integrating sustainability into the Five-Year Plan.

At the April 21 press conference, when Lee talked about the public consultation for the five-year plan, sustainability, carbon and pollution were not mentioned at all. Of course, GDP growth and the perennial issues of housing and education are all vital issues that need to be addressed.

However, if we’re talking in terms of five-year plans, it’s probably worth noting that in five years from now, the world needs to have carbon emissions at half of what they are today. And that in 25 years from now – just five more five-year plans away! – we need to be at net zero. Sustainability is vital too.

Of course, Hong Kong’s tiny landmass is not home to vast factories, refineries or farms. Most of the carbon that we emit is from producing electricity to power the towers that are our homes and offices.

So while emulating the priority that sustainability is afforded in China’s five-year plan is important, copy-pasting it wholesale would miss important nuance: that Hong Kong’s carbon shadow is much larger than our territorial footprint.

We import almost everything – food, energy, goods, and even water. The spectre of our carbon emissions haunts not only what we consume, but also the vast amounts of financing that flow across the world from our international financial centre.

Sustainability in Hong Kong is not just about plonking a few solar panels down; it’s a much deeper question about consumption and green finance.

That’s not to diminish the role of sustainability in our own territory; there’s plenty of room for more ambition, not just in carbon but with other forms of pollution.

For example, the Municipal Solid Waste charging scheme’s failure to progress beyond the pilot study means that there’s little push to reduce waste at source.

While it’s true that landfill rates are going down, incineration is going up – in other words, the generation of trash is not slowing down, but is instead just being diverted to the landfill in the sky. That’s not a long-term solution.

I hasten to add that putting sustainability higher on the agenda is not just important for the Hong Kong government. Company boards and executive teams ought to be discussing sustainability during their strategy meetings.

Hopefully, seeing sustainability high on the agenda in the government’s five-year plan will light a fire under corporations to up their sustainability game too.

All told, the idea of a public consultation for Hong Kong’s five-year plan is a wonderful opportunity. Public consultations have a prior form in moving the needle – the Biodiversity Strategy Action Plan has demonstrated that.

And by aligning Hong Kong’s five-year plan with China’s, we can achieve one of the most important things of all – putting sustainability on the agenda.