Saving Coral in Colombia; Rating Your Taxi’s Smell in China

0:00Today on State of the World, saving coral in Colombia and raiding your taxi's smell in China. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. In a few minutes, China's largest taxi app lets you downrank a rank ride. But first, we're going to meet the woman known as the Mother of Colombian Coral. Marine biologist Elvira Alvarado is on a mission to rescue Colombia's endangered coral reefs. At 70, she's still diving, training others, and even improving ways to help coral reproduce. John Otis takes us to Colombia's Caribbean coast to hear about her life's work.

0:49Can you imagine paradise? It's paradise.

0:53Elvira Álvarado:That's Elvira Alvarado recalling her first time exploring a coral reef. Everything was alive. And it was green and bright orange. And there were fishes and there were huge things. And they were corals. That was nearly 50 years ago. But Alvarado still gets a thrill researching these marine invertebrates that are related to jellyfish. We meet up on the Colombian island of San Andres in the Caribbean Sea, where she's leading a project to reproduce coral. They provide food, shelter and breeding grounds for 4 ,000 fish species. Coral protects shorelines from erosion. They also support tourism by attracting snorkelers and divers.

1:40Elvira Álvarado:However, diseases, pollution and rising ocean temperatures are taking a huge toll, says Juliana Vanegas, a marine biologist who works with Alvarado. The corals are still alive, but they're bleached, and they are not feeding, and they start to get like weak and weak and weak. And if that lasts for enough time, the corals die, basically of starvation. Since the 1970s, when Alvarado first put on a wetsuit, more than half of all the coral in the Caribbean have died. Here on San Andres, she says 70 % are gone. I saw them dying. I saw them turning white. I saw them getting loose. And that was the moment I said, this is...

2:26Elvira Álvarado:This is what I want to do? Yes. Television also drew her to the ocean. As a young girl living in the U.S., she was fascinated by programs like Sea Hunt and Flipper, about a bottlenose dolphin that outsmarted most of the humans on the show. She moved back to Colombia in the 1960s to become one of the country's first female marine biologists to focus on coral reef restoration. Along the way, she got to meet the world's most famous oceanographer when he came through Colombia. Jacques Cousteau, of course. You know I knew him in person? Wow. You can't imagine what a young girl, marine biologist, having him by your side.

3:08We sat down and he was talking to me. It was a dream.

3:18Elvira Álvarado:Alvarado was a natural underwater. She learned to free dive without air tanks to a depth of 72 feet. She also excelled in the lab. She initially did cancer research involving sharks. However, as coral began dying off, she focused on reef restoration by growing new coral. Coral that's been weakened by disease or overheated water have a much harder time reproducing. So here on San Andres, Alvarado and her team, decked out in scuba gear, are lending a hand through in vitro fertilization. Timing is everything. Corals spawn just once a year, about a week after the full moon. That gives Alvarado's team a tiny window of opportunity to dive down and collect coral eggs and sperm.

4:07Elvira Álvarado:I tag along to see how it's done. Alvarado moves gracefully underwater. Some 30 feet down, she and her team place nets with collection tubes around selected coral. Then they return to shore and wait for them to spawn. Successful dive? Yes, it was. We found every colony, and we put the 15 traps on them. So it was good. Hours later, on a second dive, they checked the collection tubes. Last night, they came up empty. But tonight's a different story. The coral have spawned. The divers have come back with eggs and sperm, and they're ecstatic. Next, they head to a makeshift laboratory to fertilize them.

4:57Elvira Álvarado:They mix together eggs and sperm and place them in water-filled plastic tubs. Later, Alvarado shows us what the tiny coral embryos look like. So I'm looking through a microscope at recently fertilized coral eggs, and they kind of have the shape of little raspberries. Soon, the coral hatchlings will be placed in seaside nurseries for 6 to 12 months. Then the young coral will be transplanted to existing reefs. And because the team has gathered genetic material from coral that appear more resistant to heat and stress, such coral IVF is designed to reproduce hardier varieties. The trick, says Alvarado, is to regenerate coral faster than they die.

5:45Elvira Álvarado:But she's also realistic. We are not going to have the same. You're never going to see coral reefs like what you first saw when you first got in the water and started scuba diving? Not with diversity, but we will have a reef that is resistant to the warming conditions. She's also proud to have motivated young marine biologists, mostly women, who all seem to adore her. They include Maria Fernanda Maya, who heads the Blue Indigo Foundation that works to restore reefs. She's a very inspiring woman. She's my teacher. She's my professor. I'm learning from her. She's the mother of corals in Colombia.

6:25Elvira Álvarado:That's why when Alvarado finally does hang up her swim fins, her legacy will live on. When I started this, we were three, two students and me. And look what we've got now. Now it's big. It's big. We have three sites, a lot of people. This thing will continue even after I'm dead. This will continue. That's a good thing. For NPR News, I'm John Otis on San Andres Island, Colombia.

7:03Travelers to China often marvel at the speed and efficiency of ride-hailing apps there. But the ride-hailing industry faces many problems, like a surplus of drivers and a broader slowing of China's economy. NPR's Anthony Kuhn spoke to some drivers in Beijing about one particular problem that has both drivers and passengers crying foul. I've just finished a trip, and now it's time to rate the driver. The ride-hailing app asks me some questions, including, was the car smelly? This ride was fine, but I've certainly had some that were not. I took a ride around Beijing with 36-year-old driver Xiaowei, and I asked him what drivers think about being rated on their automotive aroma.

7:50Most taxi drivers whose cars smell bad actually live in their cars. I can understand them. They just want to save some money to help their families live a little better. Shao's business in northeast China failed and he went into debt, so he started driving a ride-hailing car last year to pay it off. Like many drivers, he has to work up to 15 hours a day just to get enough fare, He doesn't sleep in his car, but he can relate to drivers who do. I think the drivers whose cars smell bad are heroes who bravely face life. And I hope passengers will give them some understanding. But Chinese consumers are increasingly demanding a more pleasant experience for their money.

8:30In response to riders' complaints, China's biggest ride-hailing company, Didi Chuxing, put a new policy in place last year. If drivers get too much negative feedback about their car's smell, Didi may temporarily suspend them until they're trained to keep their cars clean. 47-year-old driver Yang Guangdong doesn't sleep in his car, but he's still received some odor complaints, which he says are often unfair and subjective. For example, let's say you like the smell of apples and your passenger likes jasmine. You don't like each other's scents, in which case he's sure to say your car stinks. Some critics say this system of ranking rides rankness misses the point.

9:09I'm not sure this measure will solve the problem, except adding more surveillance on workers. I feel it's more for public relations, you know, to kind of like appease passengers. Julie Yu Jiechen researches labor and technology at the University of Toronto. The most fundamental issues here are related to overworking drivers, and so I don't think this can be fixed by platforms alone. Didi Chuxing's earnings report says that its number of registered car owners, who either drive themselves or lease them to other drivers, increased by more than 20 percent last year to nearly 19 million. But with economic growth slowing, consumers are taking fewer trips, and order volume last year shrank by 8 percent.

9:57So many drivers are not unemployed, they're underemployed, struggling to make ends meet and spending a lot of time waiting for fares.

10:11Driver Shao Wei follows his GPS's directions. He says he's glad to have a job and he doesn't like to complain. He adds that just as riders need to be tolerant of drivers who live in their cars, drivers need to put up with riders, many of whom climb aboard, not exactly smelling like roses. Sometimes on the late shift, I meet riders who have just eaten or have bad breath, and they're very willing to communicate with me. Zhao says even a long journey passes quickly when driver and rider are amicably shooting the breeze. Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.

10:51That's the state of the world from NPR. Before we go, I want to acknowledge that today, October 1st, 2025, is the first day in over 50 years NPR and public radio have operated without federal support. That support tied us to all Americans, because even if it was at a small level, they were funding our journalism through tax dollars. But nothing about our mission changes, even without that source of funding. We still serve to inform the American public. And this podcast feed will keep bringing you stories from around the globe that tell us something about the world we're living in. Because we belong to you, the people who power us.

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