This report analyses Alipay’s Ant Forest trajectory as a green digital innovation that has achieved exponential growth over the past three years.
It first describes the green initiative and how users have interacted with the platform to accumulate green points and plant virtual, and real trees. It takes stock of the impact Alipay Ant Forest has already achieved in China, and then explores Ant Financial’s vision of expanding these impacts on poverty alleviation through conservation efforts, otherwise coined as “ecological poverty alleviation”.
The second section unpacks different policy and regulatory enablers that have made an application like Alipay Ant Forest both relevant and necessary within China’s domestic context and points out to interesting take-aways for international policymakers.
Last, the report models the implications that scaling a platform like Alipay Ant Forest could catalyze in additional countries, in terms of potential market size, and emissions avoided through individuals’ behaviors. This analysis estimates that up to 8.6% of emissions tied to public transportation could be avoided in the seven countries modeled over the 2020-2030 period.
Main findings include: