Atmospheric water harvesting: critical metrics and challenges

Atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) is a promising strategy to extract potable water from atmospheric moisture. However, current AWH strategies encounter two significant dilemmas: (1) comparison between different AWH technologies lacks fairness; (2) the development direction of AWH is unclear. Thermodynamic evaluation with the minimum energy requirement analysis of four AWH methods is expected to achieve a fair comparison of the technologies and their global deployment. Besides the transition to a more sustainable and cost-efficient AWH implementation, we should reach a consensus to evaluate the potential of AWH technologies, evaluate the challenges and barriers remaining in current AWH technologies, and propose a realistic pathway to improve process performance.