A new paper is out, and this one started with something very ordinary: the Thai water jar.

Together with Dr. Kuekkong Suadee, we looked at rainwater storage in Ban Khao Yi San, Samut Songkhram, a coastal settlement where groundwater and canals can become brackish because of saline intrusion. Our paper, “Pottery jar rainwater storage as living heritage: cultural adaptation to saline intrusion in coastal Thailand,” has now been published in the Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development.

What interested us was not only the jar itself, but the whole system around it: roofs used as catchments, improvised pipes, first-flush practices, decisions about which water to drink, and local knowledge about when and where freshwater could be found. In the past, households often kept large reserves of rainwater and sometimes transported fresher water by boat from upstream. Today, many families are moving toward smaller hybrid systems that combine rainwater storage with intermittent piped water.

So the “โอ่ง” is more than a container. It is part of a living water heritage, a combination of object, space, routine, memory, and adaptation.

And because academic papers do not always look very exciting on social media, we also had a little fun turning the research into a dramatic Thai-style news poster. 😄

The broader point is serious, though: when planning WASH and community water systems, we should not look only at pipes and centralized infrastructure. Existing household practices and local knowledge can also be part of climate adaptation and water resilience.

Paper: “Pottery jar rainwater storage as living heritage: cultural adaptation to saline intrusion in coastal Thailand”
Patiphol Yodsurang & Kuekkong Suadee
Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development, 2026. https://doi.org/10.2166/washdev.2026.140