Air pollution is one of the highest causes of premature death in the world. The World Health Organization estimates that ambient air pollution and household air pollution cause 6.7 million premature deaths annually.¹ More than 2 billion people live in water-stressed countries where the demand for clean water outpaces supply because supplies or infrastructure are insufficient.²

Further, relying on dirty, contaminated water leads to outbreaks of many waterborne diseases, causing death or serious harm. Collecting safe drinking water is also a significant opportunity cost, as women and children can spend hours daily on trips back and forth. That is time that could be spent on education, leisure, or work elsewhere.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve of backward bending pollution curves applies to indoor and outdoor air pollution. When per capita GDP increases, death rates from outdoor pollution increase before falling dramatically.³ Wealthier people living in more prosperous countries have much lower death rates from indoor air pollution.⁴ Richer countries have more funds to invest in public services such as sanitation, garbage collection, and pollution abatement – all of which help improve air and water quality.

The principles of economic freedom and the application of markets play a significant role in reducing pollution and gaining access to clean water. Property rights incentivize stewardship because property owners benefit economically and environmentally from taking care of their assets and value. The application and legal protection of property rights help address pollution. For instance, a factory cannot dump waste into a stream when it adversely affects landowners living downstream. They must address the pollution, ensuring the water remains unpolluted.

In both developed countries and emerging economies, allocating and protecting property rights can help citizens attain clean water access. Establishing clearer water rights in drought-ridden areas can prevent overuse and encourage conservation.⁵

---

---

---

---

Several smaller companies have implemented property rights, technology, and price signals to bring clean drinking water to rural communities in Africa. Water4 is an organization that installs water pumps in rural areas of Ghana, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia.⁶ The company offers training the community to operate, maintain, and fix the pumping technology and charges a small fee for the clean water. This provides a revenue source and ensures that the community has ownership of the water infrastructure, which incentivizes upkeep and repairs. With more than 17,000 projects, Water4 has established market-based, privately run utilities that not only provide clean water access but also spur economic growth in the community.⁷

A similar company operating in Tanzania, Kenya, and The Gambia is eWATER services. Writing about the company his book Time to Think Small,⁸ environmental analyst Todd Myers describes how private ownership, and relatively simple technologies, provide clean water access. People in these communities can buy credits (for $10 per year) and use a fob to gain access to operating solar-powered water pumps. Cloud technology records transactions to ensure proper payment, and eWATER services use the proceeds for infrastructure maintenance and improvement.⁹ Sensors and remote software detect any problems with water flow or other operational problems. Critically, the technology works well in areas with very low data connectivity.⁷ As shown on its real-time dashboard, the company has served more than 260,000 people and dispersed more than 375 million gallons of clean water.¹⁰

In both developed countries and emerging economies, allocating and protecting property rights can help citizens attain clean water access. Establishing clearer water rights in drought-ridden areas can prevent overuse and encourage conservation

Property rights and markets work to solve environmental challenges in other ways, too. Emissions trading programs for air emissions and water discharges create property rights through tradeable permits. Rather than a top-down, command-and-control approach that imposes stringent regulations on industry, cap-and-trade programs can set emissions limits that are adequate to protect human health. The limit is divided into allowances for each affected industry to create a flexible, transparent market to buy and sell them. Companies that reduce their pollution more cheaply can sell excess permits to harder-to-abate sectors, with the price driven by the supply and demand of available allowances in the marketplace.

Creating a market incentivizes innovative solutions, reduces a firm’s cost to meet emissions limits, and lowers the overall cost of reducing pollution. Though estimates of the savings vary, analysis of the U.S. acid rain cap-and-trade program found significant cost savings compared to a standard regulatory approach.¹¹

---

---

1. World Health Organization, “Household air pollution,” October 16, 2024, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health[↩]
2. “As Shortages Mount, Countries Hunt for Novel Sources of Water,” UNEP, January 17, 2024 https://www.unep. org/news-and-stories/story/shortages-mount-countries-hunt-novel-sources-water[↩]
3. “Death rate from outdoor air pollution vs. GDP per capita, 2019,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/outdoor-pollution-rate-vs-gdp[↩]
4. “Death rate from indoor air pollution vs. GDP per capita, 2019,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-indoor-air-pollution-vs-gdp-per-capita[↩]
5. Bryan Leonard and Tate Watkins, “Arizona Water Reform,” PERC, June 6, 2023, https://www.perc.org/wp-con-tent/uploads/2023/03/Arizona-Water-Reform-FINAL.pdf[↩]
6. https://www.water4.org/impact[↩]
7. Ibid.[↩][↩]
8. Todd Myers, Time to Think Small: How Nimble Environmental Technologies Can Solve the Planet’s Biggest Problems (US: Charlesbridge Adult, 2023).[↩]
9. https://www.ewater.services/#howitworks[↩]
10. https://commercial.ewater.services/[↩]
11. Ron Chan, et al., “The Impact of Trading on the Costs and Benefits of the Acid Rain Program,” Resources for the Future, April 2017.https://media.rff.org/documents/RFF-DP-15-25-REV.pdf[↩]