Environmental Degradation and Sustainability Governance in Colombia: An Integrative Review

Environmental degradation in Colombia is often studied through separate sectoral lenses, although air pollution, emerging water contaminants, urban noise, mining-related soil contamination, artisanal-mining exposure, and material throughput arise from overlapping institutional and economic conditions. This review compares these domains to identify how environmental-health protection, social equity, resource use, and implementation capacity can inform sustainability governance. A structured integrative synthesis of 62 peer-reviewed, institutional, and conceptual sources organized evidence into cross-domain matrices and six ordinal dimensions: structural entrenchment, human-health burden, ecological propagation, persistence, financing attribution, and implementation complexity. A pattern was treated as convergent when it recurred in at least four domains and retained its meaning under a three-domain sensitivity threshold. Four convergences were identified: lock-in in mobility, production, and livelihood systems; coupled health–ecosystem effects; disproportionate exposure under informality and territorial inequality; and the need for policy portfolios rather than single instruments. Three divergences shaped feasible action: flow versus stock pollution, short versus long response horizons, and concentrated versus diffuse financing responsibility. The synthesis supports a proposed dual-track framework. Immediate measures prioritize source control, surveillance, safer work, and protection of exposed populations; longer-term measures address clean infrastructure, remediation, and the redesign of production and consumption. The profiles, horizons, and portfolio shares are interpretive planning tools, not measured effects, aggregate rankings, or optimized allocations. The contribution is the integration of established governance concepts into a Colombian comparison that connects urgent exposure reduction with equitable, sustained environmental improvement.