With rapid growth of human population and decreasing labefaction of our environment, the usable fresh water is facing severe pollution and global shortage. Bio-inspired engineering and biotemplate-directed engineering thus offer great promise in clean water generation, including desalination, decontamination, and disinfection. This perspective begins with an introduction of solar energy-based interfacial evaporation system inspired by the natural systems of organisms, and then provides a review of the development and recent progress of the interfacial evaporation system for clean water generation. The long-term outlook in this field of clean water generation using bio-inspired interfacial systems is also discussed.