From Engineer to Ocean Advocate: Carlos Mallo's Journey with Innoceana
Release Date: 01/08/2025
84 Percent: Inside the Worst Coral Bleaching Event Ever Recorded
How To Protect The Ocean
This year, most of the coral on the planet went through heat stress severe enough to bleach it. That's not a rounding error: 84 percent of the world's reef area, across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, and NOAA had to add three brand-new alert levels to its Coral Reef Watch scale because the existing one had no category for what was happening. In this episode, Andrew breaks down exactly where global coral reefs stand right now: how the fourth global mass bleaching event on record got declared, why NOAA waited until 2026 to confirm it had actually ended, and why every global bleaching...
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Everyone in the Tent: How Ocean Treaties Actually Get Made
How To Protect The Ocean
Holly Koehler has spent almost thirty years in rooms most people never think about: windowless UN offices in New York, the FAO in Rome, and what she calls "oftentimes very boring hotel ballrooms around the world," where countries hash out how the ocean actually gets managed. She's the Vice President of Policy and Outreach at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and before that she spent thirteen years at the U.S. State Department's Office of Marine Conservation, chairing international fisheries negotiations. In this episode, she walks Andrew through how a grad-school...
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Inside the System That Makes a Seafood Label Trustworthy
How To Protect The Ocean
Between a fishing vessel out on the water and a can of tuna in your grocery cart, there is a complex, little-understood system working to verify whether you should trust what is on the label. In this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, host Andrew Lewin breaks down how that system actually works, and why the blue check mark on your seafood means something real. Andrew starts with the RFMO, a regional fisheries management organization: a treaty-based body where countries with a stake in a fishery legally bind themselves to cooperate on how it is managed. He walks through where...
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The Ship Has Reached the Shore: The High Seas Treaty Explained
How To Protect The Ocean
There's a video online of a room full of exhausted diplomats breaking into applause after nearly 20 years of work. One woman brings down the gavel and says, "the ship has reached the shore." That moment, in March 2023, closed out a negotiation that had already failed once in public. It became binding international law this year, and the fight over what it actually protects is happening right now. In this episode, Andrew traces the full history of the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction): from the idea first raised at a UN Oceans working...
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Corals Nearly as Old as the Pyramids, and the Fight to Save Them
How To Protect The Ocean
Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, a coral colony has been growing since before the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished. One deep-water black coral off the coast of Hawaii has been dated at 4,270 years old, making it one of the oldest living skeleton-building organisms known to science. A single pass of a bottom trawl net can wipe out that kind of habitat in seconds, and it's a fight that's still being decided this very year at the United Nations. In this episode, Andrew breaks down why bottom trawling is such a hard problem to regulate. It's rarely the fish stock itself that takes the...
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A Summer Internship, Thirty Years, and One Career for the Ages
How To Protect The Ocean
A grad student faces a simple choice: write another term paper, or take a summer internship. She takes the internship, gets assigned to sea turtles, and thirty years later she is in the room for some of the most consequential ocean policy agreements ever negotiated. This episode traces that career from the beginning, and it starts with a realization that shapes everything that follows: sea turtles do not read maps. They cross every border humans have drawn, which means protecting them requires countries to cooperate, not compete. Andrew walks through the arc of this career step by step. It...
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Deep Sea Mining Exposed: Inside the Fight to Save the Ocean's Last Frontier
How To Protect The Ocean
Deep sea mining is no longer theoretical. In this episode, Andrew sits down with Matthew Gianni, co-founder and Political and Policy Advisor of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, for an in-depth look at what's actually happening on the seafloor and in the negotiating rooms deciding its fate. Matthew spent years as a commercial fisherman, including five years as a deep sea trawlerman off the Central California coast, before moving into ocean conservation with Greenpeace International and eventually co-founding the DSCC to fight destructive bottom trawling on seamounts. That history shapes...
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5,000 New Species Prove the "Ocean Desert" Deep Sea Mining Claim Is Wrong
How To Protect The Ocean
In September 2021, Time magazine profiled Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), and his push to mine the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a stretch of international seabed between Hawaii and Mexico. In that profile, Barron called the CCZ "the most desert-like place on the planet," arguing that mining the deep sea does less environmental harm than mining a rainforest because there's supposedly so little life down there to disturb. That single line has been repeated for years as justification for deep sea mining. Andrew puts it to the test. The science tells a very different story. A...
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The Gerard Barron Pattern: Why a CEO Who Watched One Deep-Sea Mining Company Collapse Is Trying Again
How To Protect The Ocean
Why would someone who watched one deep-sea mining company collapse go back and try it again? That's the question at the center of this episode, and it's not hypothetical. It happened, with the same industry, some of the same licenses, and the same person at the center of it: Gerard Barron, now CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), one of the most prominent and best-funded companies pushing to start commercial deep-sea mining today. This isn't framed as an accusation against Barron specifically. It's a documented sequence of decisions, and by the end, you can decide for yourself what the motive...
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Bottom Trawling on Seamounts: The Damage Nobody Sees
How To Protect The Ocean
Seamounts are underwater mountains that rise at least 1,000 meters from the seafloor without breaking the surface, and they punch far above their weight biologically. Topographic upwelling pulls cold, nutrient-rich water up their slopes, fueling plankton blooms that draw fish, sharks, seabirds, and marine mammals, while their rocky surfaces give slow-growing corals and sponges a rare hard place to root in an otherwise soft-sediment deep sea. Roughly one in five seamount species are endemic, found nowhere else on Earth, which is why scientists call them oases in the deep sea. That's exactly...
info_outlineIn this episode of the "How to Protect the Ocean" podcast, host Andrew Lewin interviews Carlos Mallo, the founder and CEO of Innoceana, an innovative marine conservation organization. Carlos shares his journey from being an engineer to a marine conservationist, highlighting the pivotal moments that led him to launch Innoceana.
Carlos grew up in Spain, surrounded by the ocean, which instilled in him a deep love for marine environments. He initially pursued a career in engineering, focusing on construction projects related to harbors and marinas. However, after a transformative trip to Thailand, where he volunteered at a marine conservation center, Carlos realized he wanted to dedicate his life to ocean conservation. This experience ignited his passion and prompted him to leave his stable engineering job.
Upon returning to Spain, Carlos faced the challenge of starting a non-profit organization without a clear plan. Encouraged by a contact from the Ministry of Environment, he gathered friends and family to help establish Innoceana. With limited resources, he relied on his savings and small grants to fund the organization in its early years.
Carlos's engineering background played a crucial role in shaping Innoceana's approach. He identified a gap in the conservation field where engineers could contribute significantly, particularly in assessing environmental conditions and developing innovative solutions. His first project involved collaborating with local dive centers in Thailand to measure water quality, which laid the groundwork for future initiatives.
Innoceana has since expanded its reach, focusing on community engagement and capacity building. Carlos emphasizes the importance of working with local communities to empower them in marine conservation efforts. The organization has launched various projects, including coral restoration, whale monitoring, and plastic cleanup initiatives, while also establishing a marine conservation center in the Canary Islands.
Overall, Carlos Mallo's journey illustrates the power of passion, innovation, and community collaboration in driving marine conservation efforts through Innoceana.
Website: https://innoceana.org/
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