Perspective and Prospects on Applying Artifificial Intelligence to Address Water and Environmental Challenges of 21st Century

One of the most pervasive challenges affecting human and planetary well-being is inadequate access to clean water and sanitation. Problems with water are expected to become worse in the coming decades, with water scarcity occurring globally, in the face of ever-growing populations, intensive human activities, and climatic variation. Addressing the aforementioned water security has been achieved consensus and has been included into the sustainable development goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations’ Agenda 2030. Despite these ample opportunities, it remains challenging to create reliable, sustainable, and affordable solutions to providing universal access to clean water and sanitation. In this context, the emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology can be an attractive solution to help with this challenge. We summarized the core of the SDGs-Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) and the problems encountered during the progress to date. Building upon which, we conducted a literature review and provided a stateof- the-art analysis of leveraging AI to help achieving SDGs-Goal 6 alongside the resultant impacts. Afterwards, we highlighted the key issues necessary to be tackled in the coming years if AI is expected to be well applied with its maximum benefits. Plus, we put forward the prospects of future efforts on this revolution.