Carlos Mallo Molina has been awarded the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize for protecting the marine biodiversity of Tenerife, the most populated of the Canary Islands. On this episode of Mongabay’s podcast, Molina explains what led him to quit his job as a civil engineer on a road project impacting the Teno-Rasca marine protected area (MPA) and his subsequent campaign to stop the port project it was planned to connect to, which would have impacted the biodiversity of the area.

Ultimately, his campaign was successful and contributed to the decision of the Canary Islands government to abandon the port plan. Now, Molina and his nonprofit Innoceana are helping set up an environmental education center in its place. Molina details the years he spent fighting to protect this ecosystem, the data that helped influence the government, and the tension within the local communities between those wanting the project to move forward and others seeking to protect their waters. “I was going diving every weekend in my free time, and it was full of sea turtles, it was full of whales, it was full of marine life. And so, I think understanding how my impact was going to destroy [a] marine protected area … I think that was where I had my biggest click in my brain … I need to do something to change what I’m doing, in [a] way that I can protect this ocean,” he says. This article was originally published on Mongabay