Diego Lugo-Vivas is an openly gay scholar and activist from the south of Colombia, who has a master’s degree in Sociology and PhD in International Environmental Studies. Lugo-Vivas' interests lie at the intersection between political ecology, environmental sociology, critical / gender comparative geographies, and the politics of space.

One of the major gaps in the analysis of harm reduction is the relationship between the environment and the world of drug cultivation and production, which in South America is particularly linked to the production and distribution of cocaine and marijuana. The objective of this presentation is to continue preliminarily with the advancement of the concept of harm reduction, taking into account its environmental dimension. In this sense, continuing with the work of Rhodes (2009, 2021), this presentation seeks to advance in the concept of Environmental Harm Reduction, proposing the intrinsic relationship between environmental impacts and the world of drugs, from the toxicity and chemical agents associated with cocaine production to the technological packages used in the war on drugs and the gender and reproductive violence linked to pesticide spraying and the new toxicity of corporate anti-drug greening.
However, this approach to the concept of Ecological Harm Reduction does not seek to focus only on the relationship between the environment and chemicals in its most classical sense, but rather on little addressed elements of harm reduction, particularly on the relationship between the environment, health (public, physical, spiritual and especially psycho-emotional health) and the condition of marginalized populations, with special interest in racialized and gendered populations and those in conditions of vulnerability and economic and spatial exclusion. This presentation advances a theoretical discussion that gathers some of the classic elements of the Ecologic Harm Reduction and broadens its basis to the study of the previously mentioned relationships. For this purpose, I will present advances of my work in the departments of Cauca and Meta (south and east of Colombia) oriented to unveil, from the concepts of solastalgia and syndemia, the impacts on local ecosystems and racialized bodies of the different toxicities, harms and forms of precariousness present in coca-growing landscapes.