The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the approaches to controlling the growing problem of environmental pollution and to and to suggest sustainable policies to address pollution in future. Pollution poses a number of devastating effects to both the environment and to human health. Pollution is accompanied by several risk factors making the society vulnerable to diseases and even to premature death. A commonly used analytical tool to quantify the cost of these factors in monetary terms is cost-of-illness (COI) strategy (Pervin et al, 2008).
Under this strategy costs are broadly divided into direct and indirect costs. With either of these strategies, the deadweight loss will always be different. Direct costs are those costs related to healthcare while indirect costs are costs due to loss of productivity due to death or impairedness. Estimating loss of productivity due to illness is however difficult with an attempt to estimate based on the annual wages of a healthy person.However this attempt yields lower values for people out of the formal employment bracket, thereby giving wrong output of productivity (Pervin et al, 2008). It is however apparent that these studies are incomplete assuming some cost implications.
It is therefore recommended that further attempts to evaluate the costs of pollution include the physical effects resulting from pollution apart from concentrating on economic aspects of health hazards (Pervin et al, 2008).
