World Wildlife Fund Nature Breaking

What responsibility do global businesses have in conserving our oceans? In this episode, Johan is joined by Marika McCauley-Sine, Chief Sustainability Officer for Mars Petcare, WWF partner and the first global pet food company to publicly commit to sustainable seafood sourcing over 15 years ago.

Today’s episode features two people who recently teamed up to tell an important story. The topic? Seaweed farming. Seaweed has all sorts of amazing applications, from feeding people to livestock, and even as a replacement for some plastic packaging. Expanding its market share in those areas could reduce the world’s reliance on land- and energy-intensive agricultural practices because seaweed farming requires no land, freshwater, fertilizer, or pesticides. And seaweed is also good for sea life, because it absorbs carbon and produces nutrients beneficial to fish and other species.

In this episode of Breaking Waves, Johan interviews Admiral Tim Gallaudet to discuss the complex intersections of ocean health, maritime competition, and national security within the context of geopolitics.

Black-footed ferrets are among the most endangered mammals in North America. These animals live in the prairies of the Great Plains, and only about 390 of them remain in the wild today. That’s actually up significantly from decades past, when they were once believed to be extinct. But big threats remain in the form of habitat loss and a non-native disease called sylvatic plague, which affects the ferrets as well as the prairie dogs that they rely on for food and prairie dog burrows for shelter.

Welcome to Breaking Waves, a 6-episode limited series from WWF's Nature Breaking podcast. In this episode Johan Bergenas talks with Dr. Enric Sala, Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, and Dr. Gabby Ahmadia, WWF's VP of Area-Based Ocean Conservation on the ecological and economic benefits of well-managed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Both have extensive experience implementing and studying MPAs, including "no-take" areas (which prohibit all fishing and other extractive activity) and "multi-use" areas (which allow for regulated activities, including some forms of extraction and recreation, in designated zones).

As we approach the upcoming Juneteenth holiday, today’s episode is about environmental justice. You’ve probably heard that term before, but in short, it refers to the notion that underserved and historically underrepresented communities with higher populations of black, indigenous, and other peoples of color, have born a disproportionate share of the impacts from climate change and environmental degradation. And over the last few decades there’s been a growing movement to address that disparity head on, by raising awareness, engaging companies and other actors that contribute to localized environmental harm, and by changing federal, state and local policies to ensure better outcomes.

Welcome to Breaking Waves, a 6-episode limited series from WWF's Nature Breaking podcast. In this episode of Breaking Waves, WWF's Senior Vice President of Ocean Conservation, Johan Bergenas, talks with Bill Hilf, Chairman of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, about the progression and potential of AI for ocean conservation. 

Today’s episode focuses on the latest efforts to conserve wild tigers. After a century of decline, tiger populations began to rebound in the last decade, growing from just 3,200 in 2010 to over 5,500 today. But tigers are still an endangered species. So what are the most important steps we can take to keep tiger populations trending upward? That was the topic of the recent Sustainable Financing for Tiger Landscapes Conference in Bhutan. As the title suggests, one of the biggest hurdles facing tiger conservation is funding. Simply put, countries with wild tigers need more reliable, long-term sources of funding to continue implementing conservation measures at the scale required.

Breaking Waves is a new 6-episode limited series that will run on the Nature Breaking feed throughout the summer of 2024. 

Today’s episode celebrates an important milestone: the 10th anniversary of the largest tropical forest conservation program on Earth. It’s called the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program for Life, or ARPA for Life, for short. And since 2014 it has helped provide the resources required to protect 150 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon, an area larger than the state of California.