Interview with Mylène Zambon

Mylène is giving the CEI 2021 Educational Workshop entitled 'Carbon Offsetting'. CEI Young reporter Selin (Turkey) sat down with her for a quick chat to find out more.

Interviewer: Selin (Young Reporter, Turkey)

Interviewer: Thank you for accepting the interview. I'd like to start with some introduction questions. Could you please introduce yourself and briefly the organization you are a part of?

Mylène: Hello, I’m Mylène Zambon. I work for a company called South Pole but I'm joining CEI as a workshop leader independent from my company as a personal interest and I personally know one of the organizers who invented me to join. I work in the field of sustainability and more specifically I work on everything related to how carbon credits are made.

Interviewer: Could you please explain your story of meeting CEI?

Mylène: I got to know CEI through Jana. I'm friends with Julien and Jana. For as long as I know Jana have talked about this organization that they're part of and this year Jana asked whether that they needed some more speakers and whether I wanted to give a workshop and so that's how I got introduced to it.

Interviewer: That's really nice. As a workshop leader do you have any expectations or something you hope to see in your workshop?

Mylène: I hope everyone finds it fun and interesting and learn something new. It’s a very niche corner of sustainability that I work in, and I’m always like spreading the word a little bit so that people at least know what it is because there's a lot of misconceptions about carbon credits. So yeah, that's what I'm hoping for the workshop.

Interviewer: Could you please give us a small insight on the content of the workshop?

Mylène: In the workshop, I'll start with a little bit of an introduction to what carbon credits actually are and how they are created, what kind of projects they come from, and I'll break down a few of the misconceptions and some of the ideas that are around that. In my professional life, I focus on creating carbon credits from specific types of projects including more nature focused projects. So, that includes reforesting, peatlands and agriculture. So those will be the three that I focus on in the end and hopefully I'll split everyone over those three topics, and everyone will find a topic that they like to try and work a little bit out what would be possible with a case study.

Interviewer: That sounds really exciting. I’ve seen that your work focuses on projects concerning reducing carbon emissions, and some of your projects are about reforestation to protect biodiversity in Europe. Could you please elaborate on the content of your article “Tree planting with a difference: Protecting Europe’s last wilderness”?

Mylène: The company I work for does a lot of different things, it's all related to sustainability in some shape or form. The work that I do focuses on Europe as you said and on reducing carbon emissions in some shape or form including planting trees. Because, of course, when trees grow, they absorb carbon through carbon sequestration and one way to have the combination of doing something against climate change and doing something for biodiversity is to plant trees. A big misconception with that is that just the concept of planting trees being enough. But actually, you need to plant trees and maintain the trees because they need to grow and that's the part that you're trying to achieve, the growing part. It's one of the initiatives that the company does to try and help smaller projects that look at planting trees specifically to find finance and then to not just plant the trees but also to maintain the forest that they're planting. So that, biodiversity can increase, and the forest can actually grow and sequester the carbon that it can as a forest.

Interviewer: Thank you so much.

Link to Mylène’s Article: https://www.southpole.com/fr/blog/tree-planting-with-a-difference-protecting-europes-last-wilderness