The recipe for destroying a coral reef isn’t hard to follow. Add pollution to encourage algae growth, throw in a dash of overfishing to eliminate the fish that could eat those algae, and top it off with an extreme event: a major flood, a cyclone, a hurricane, or a heatwave caused by global warming. There you go! The bleached coral is ready to be served!

This curious and frightening culinary analogy offers a taste of what you’ll find in the second episode of Voices of the South: a dive into the largest and least understood ecosystem on the planet—the oceans—to observe the problems that we, as humans, are causing there.

In “Coasts: Hot, Pale, and in Danger,” the ‘Voices from the South’ team talks with experts about two of the most talked-about environmental dilemmas facing the world’s oceans, which are occurring right here in Brazil and Australia: the warming and acidification of ocean waters leading to the bleaching of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest structure composed solely of living organisms; and the threat that the nearly unstoppable oil exploration off Brazil’s Equatorial Coast poses to the mangroves in the Amazon River estuary region, the longest and best-preserved mangrove belt on the planet.

"In 2016, after a fourteen-year hiatus, we had a massive bleaching event in Australia. More than half of the corals died during that extremely hot summer. That was the largest coral die-off we had ever seen on the Great Barrier Reef, and it was only surpassed by the one in 2024. And when that interval is so short, there’s no chance for a decent recovery,” Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council’s Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, explained to our team. Known as the “coral sentinel,” Terry is the world’s leading expert on the Great Barrier Reef.

In addition to him, we also spoke with Nils Asp, from Rio Grande do Sul, who doesn’t officially have that nickname, but could very well be called the “sentinel of the mangroves” in Brazil. He has lived and worked for 20 years in northern Pará, where he teaches at the state’s Federal University and is a member of the Foz do Amazonas Observatory, a network of over 100 researchers working in an interdisciplinary manner to understand and propose solutions to the region’s problems.

For the team at The Conversation, Nils gave a lecture on the risks of oil and gas exploration in the region, without overlooking the social, economic, and development factors that make this issue—whether or not to exploit fossil fuels in one of the most sensitive regions for the planet’s preservation—an even more complex dilemma.

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In five episodes, “Voices from the South” presents the results of dozens of interviews with academics and custodians of the ancestral knowledge of the indigenous peoples in both countries regarding the science behind combating forest fires, the impacts of mining, the warming of ocean waters, and the influence of agriculture and livestock on global warming. The podcast also highlights examples of innovation that Brazil and Australia—where the power of the sun, wind, rivers, and waves abound—are developing in the field of renewable energy.

This is the essence of the adventure our team of journalists, led by Environment Editor Luciana Julião, undertook to produce “Voices from the South,” whose episodes 1, 2, and 3 you can listen to now.

“Voices from the South” is a co-production of The Conversation Brazil with the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), funded by the Council on Australia-Latin America Relations (COALAR) and with strategic consulting from The Conversation Media Group.

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Voices of the South, Episode 2: “Coasts: Hot, Pale, and in Danger”

Episode guests:

1 - Terry Hughes, professor of Marine Biology at James Cook University (Queensland, Australia), former director of the Australian Research Council’s Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (2005–2020)

2 - Maicon Messias da Silva, biologist and scuba diving instructor

3 - Nils Asp, oceanographer and professor at the Federal University of Pará in Bragança (PA)

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“Voices of the South” Team:

Editorial coordination and narration: Luciana Julião

Script: Luciana Julião, with assistance from Luciana Colodete

English narration: Melissa Garcia

English version script: Gustavo Almeida

Research: Fernando Vives (Australia), Luciana Colodete, Luciana Julião, and Mariana Moreira (Brazil)

Fact-checking: Fernando Vives and Luciana Colodete

Editing, soundtrack, and mixing: Bruno Cysne

Translations: Paulo Mussoi

Voice-overs: Eleven Labs

Social media: Carolina Aleixo

Audiovisual: Paulo Mussoi and Carolina Aleixo

Visual identity: Laura Garcia

Consultant: Maria Ataide Malcher, Federal University of Pará

UFPA Team: Arlene Cantão Costa, Ana Teresa Lima Nascimento, Bismaike da Silva Santos, Victor Hugo Pinheiro dos Santos, Marcus Anderson Batista Leal, and Natália da Silva Maia de Almeida

Executive production: Daniel Stycer and Paulo Mussoi