Growing a global forest: Ant Financial, Alipay, and the Ant Forest

Hao Liang, Hannah H. Chang, Ryan Merrill, Lan Yang, Adina Wong

Ant Forest is a green initiative within the Chinese payment and lifestyle app Alipay that was started in 2016 as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) project.
  • It was financially supported by Alipay's parent company, Ant Financial.
  • From the time of its launch to October 2018, Ant Forest has managed to attract almost 400 million users to its cause of promoting 'green', low carbon emissions behaviour among the lifestyles of its users.
  • It has done so by letting users of Ant Forest win 'energy points' through low-carbon behaviours (such as walking to work instead of driving, or reducing their use of plastic), and then accumulating the points towards planting a virtual tree of their choice.
  • When a user had accumulated a sufficient number of energy points, Ant...

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