Peng Wang, the 2020 (9th Award) Alternative Water Resources Prize winner of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) has been chosen to judge the XPRIZE Water Scarcity Prize, a US $119 million, 5-year global competition designed to drive widespread access to clean water by creating reliable, sustainable, and affordable seawater desalination systems.

Additionally, the 2022 (10th Award) Alternative Water Resources Prize winner, Menachem Elimelech, is serving on the XPRIZE Water Scarcity Prize advisory board, along with 11 other preeminent global leaders in water resources science.

The XPRIZE Water Scarcity Prize, which was inaugurated this year, seeks to revolutionize desalination - reimagining systems, methods, and materials to drive its scalable and sustainable use. It encourages global innovators from various fields to identify solutions to effectively disrupt this industry.

Competing teams will aim to develop technologies that can responsibly expand access to the water contained in Earth’s seas and oceans, positively impacting billions of people globally, and creating a world where clean water is more equitably available and sustainably abundant.

The winning teams will need to create new desalination solutions to enable future-proof water supply for communities and ecosystems. These solutions must be scalable, cost-effective, reliable, and resilient in a changing climate. They should demonstrate enhanced environmental sustainability across energy and materials and minimize harm to marine life.

There are two tracks:

Track A: The System-Level Innovation track will require its winners to reliably and most sustainably generate one million liters of potable water per day (1,000 m3/d) from seawater at the lowest cost, below a target benchmark to ensure global accessibility, over the course of 1 year; sufficient to support 10,000 people (based on WHO Standards). The deadline to register for this track is 31 March 2025.

Track B: The Novel Membrane Materials track will pursue the search for the perfect membrane to cut the cost of water production and increase reliability and sustainability, paving a future path to extend the lifetime of existing seawater reverse osmosis desalination plants. The deadline to register for this track is 31 May 2025.

Peng Wang is Chair Professor and Founding Director of the Institute of Carbon Neutrality and Green Development at Sun Yat-sen University in China. Prior to this, he was a founding faculty member at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where he served as Chair of the Environmental Science and Engineering Program from 2013 to 2017. His research broadly focuses on sustainable water production and the water-energy-food-environment nexus. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and a 2023 Clarivate “Highly Cited Researcher”.

In 2020, Dr. Wang received the PSIPW 9th Award's Alternative Water Resources Prize for work at the forefront of the solar-water nexus, involving solar-energy driven fresh-water generation using environmental nanotechnology, solar desalination, zero liquid discharge desalination, and atmospheric water harvesting.

Since then, Dr. Wang has received many accolades, including the Nanova Frontier Research Award by CAPEES (2020), the Zijin Quanxing Distinguished Alumni Award from Nanjing University (2021), the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Water Award (2023), and the Agilent ACT-UR Award (2025).

Dr. Wang has held prominent advisory roles, including membership on Hong Kong’s Advisory Committee on Water Supplies (2022–2024) and service as a juror for the 2024 Global Prize for Innovation in Desalination (GPID). He currently serves as Co-Founding President of the International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Association (since June 2024) and is an Executive Editor of Environmental Science & Technology.

Menachem Elimelech is the Nancy and Clint Carlson Professor at Rice University, with joint appointments in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. Prior to his 2024 appointment at Rice University, he was the Sterling Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University.

In 2022, Dr. Elimelech received the PSIPW 10th Award's Alternative Water Resources Prize along with his colleague Chinedum Osuji of the University of Pennsylvania for the significant advances they made in nanostructured materials for next-generation membranes and water purification technologies, with a particular focus on implementation issues like manufacturing, sustainability, self-assembled materials, and biofouling.

More recently, he has won the International Water Association (IWA)'s 2023 membrane Technology Award, and the 2024 award of the Connecticut Medal of Technology.