Atmospheric water harvesting: technologies, materials, and pathways toward scalable and sustainable deployment

• Multi-faceted evaluation framework for atmospheric water harvesting performance. • Transformative potential of advanced sorbent materials. • Techno-economic evaluation of atmospheric water harvesting. • Challenges of fog harvesting, condensation, and thermoelectric cooling. • Roadmap for scalable and sustainable atmospheric water harvesting deployment. The scarcity of freshwater resources resulting from climate change, environmental pollution, and rapid population growth poses a severe threat to human life. To overcome these global problem numerous studies have been conducted on the techniques of water harvesting from atmospheric air. Thus, atmospheric water harvesting systems emerged as a promising solution towards supplementing freshwater by directly extracting water vapor from the atmosphere. However, extracting fresh water from the atmosphere is challenged by large-scale deployment, cost-effectiveness, and water quality issues. This review analyzes the recent advancements of atmospheric water harvesting technologies, with a focus on material innovation, energy consumption, performance metrics, techno-economic considerations, water quality and practical deployment potential from peer-reviewed papers between 2000 and 2026 using databases of Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and IEEE Xplore assessing trends across sorbent-based, radiative cooling, condensation, and hybrid systems. The review highlights significant progress in the development of hygroscopic materials, represented by advanced metal–organic frameworks and composite salt-polymer sorbents, which achieve as high as 5.5 kg/m 2 /day of water under low-humidity conditions, as well as 16.9 kg/m 2 /day in higher humidities. Hybrid systems with passive cooling and sorption have been able to reduce energy consumption down to 0.2 kWh/L. Future studies should emphasize system integration, life-cycle analysis, and optimization in arid climates for sustainability and decentralized potable water extraction. This review has provided a thorough summary of the advancements in atmospheric water harvesting and has laid the groundwork for the development of next-generation water harvesting technologies.