DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY SHAPING GREEN AND SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES: EXPLORING ALIPAY ANT FOREST

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY SHAPING GREEN AND SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES: EXPLORING ALIPAY ANT FOREST

Data-Pop AllianceData-Pop Alliance is a collaborative laboratory created by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Connection Science, and Overseas Development Institute. DPA brings together researchers, experts, practitioners, and activists to change the world with data through three pillars of work: diagnosing local realities and human problems with data and AI; mobiliz-ing capacities, communities, and ideas towards more data literate societies, and transforming the systems and processes that underpin our societies and countries. In 2016, Flowminder Foundation joined as the fourth Core Member.

Green Digital Finance AllianceThe Green Digital Finance Alliance is a unique public private partnership co-founded by UN Environment and ANT Financial Services launched in Davos in 2017 to leverage digital technologies and innovations to enhance financing for sustainable development. The GDFA catalyzes market innovation and policy action that leverages digital finance to, on the one hand, address the barriers to scaling sustainable finance and, on the other hand, promote innovation that un-locks sustainable investments in the real economy.

UNEP InquiryThe Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System has been initiated by the United Nations Environment Pro-gramme (UNEP) to advance policy options to improve the financial system’s effectiveness in mobilizing capital towards a green and inclusive economy—in other words, sustainable development. Established in January 2014, it published the first edition of ‘The Financial System We Need’ in October 2015, with the second edition launched in October 2016. The Inquiry has worked in 20 countries and produced a wide array of briefings and reports on sustainable finance.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 5

I. The case of Alipay Ant Forest: mitigating climate change through individual behavior changes 6A. How does Ant Forest work? 6B. Impacts to Date: Exponential Growth and Environmental Focus 7

1. Avoided carbon emissions 7

2. Afforestation activities 8

C. Further Impacts: Ant’s contribution to Ecological Poverty Alleviation 9

II. Making it happen: institutional and policy enablers for citizen action towards carbon reduction 11A. Green Finance 11B. Green FinTech 12

III. Scaling abroad? The potential for citizen action towards carbon reduction in other markets 14A. Estimating Market Potential 14B. Estimating emissions reduction potential 15

IV. Main Findings 17

Annex A - A study of impacts: modeling methodology 18

V. References 20

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Introduction Recent climate emergencies paint a clear picture: a world in need of urgent action. With global temperatures already 1°C above pre-industrial levels, and with no clear ‘one-size fits all’ mitigation measures, it is not only necessary, but required, to mobilize widespread individual behavioral changes towards more sustainable lifestyles. Digital plat-forms are uniquely poised as mechanisms to help achieve this change, particularly as they can incen-tivize widespread action and nudge individuals towards more sustainable, larger-scale behavioral changes.

Alipay Ant Forest, launched by Ant Financial in 2016, is a green initiative embedded on Alipay’s digital lifestyle platform that is doing just that. By providing users with a tool to help measure their personal carbon footprints, recording avoided emissions derived from individual behavioral changes. Alipay Ant Forest is incentivizing citizens to become active agents in nature-based and individual behavior solutions to combat climate change. To date, this mobile based innovation has over 550 million users who have participated in the green initiative to accumulate virtual points, which in exchange, have led to planting more than 122 million real trees in northwestern China, spanning an area of over 1.68 million mu.

This innovative application is showing how green digital technologies can increasingly play an important role in helping countries achieve their emissions reduction targets - indeed, while policies and locked-in industry infrastructure may take decades to change, individual behavior shifts can begin immediately. While people-

based actions for climate mitigation cannot, by any means, substitute much needed industry and economy-wide efforts, they can significantly contribute to these efforts through mobilizing tangible and widespread collective impacts. In fact, unlocking bottom-up citizen action for climate change mitigation may be the avenue needed to help governments run the “last mile” and reach the last percentages needed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

This report analyzes 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.

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I. The case of Alipay Ant Forest: mitigating climate change through individual behavior changes

A. How does Ant Forest work?

Alipay’s Ant Forest is a green initiative that aims to unlock the power of individual behavior change and bottom-up approaches for climate change mitigation and poverty reduction. The platform was launched in 2016 and has since become China’s largest digital innovation aimed at reducing carbon emissions, promoting reforest-ation, and advancing poverty alleviation efforts. Through an interactive interface embedded in Alipay, the world’s leading open digital lifestyle platform, users gain “green points” by opting for green behaviors, understood as eco-friendly behaviors that result in avoided carbon emis-sions (Ant Financial 2019). Users plant and nurture a virtual tree with earned green points, which Ant Financial will then plant in real life. In the last three years Alipay Ant Forest has been online, it has attracted over 550 million users, roughly around 7% of the world’s population.

Alipay Ant Forest is open to the public and anyone can download the platform and join. This green initiative encourages users to engage in low-carbon activities in their daily life, such as paying utility bills online and commuting to work by walking or cycling rather than driving. These behaviors are counted and converted into “green energy” that users can then spend to grow virtual trees in the platform, which is embedded within the Alipay app. Simply put, actions that are green, are then rewarded with points proportional to the carbon footprint avoided by these activities (Ant Financial 2019). This represents a significant innovation in the field of carbon accounting, as the impact of carbon emissions is usually measured from a production standpoint, assessing the amount of CO2 released into the environment at the point of emissions (Moran et al. 2018). Alipay Ant Forest’s platform could be the first step towards individual carbon accounting (ESC, 2018).

Image 1: Screenshots of the Alipay Ant Forest Interface

Source: Yuxi Liu 2017, “Design for social good”.

As these points accumulate, users can plant and water their virtual tree, as well as interact with friends to gain more points. A key incentivize for Alipay Ant Forest users is the application’s interactive “game-like” design: users can water their friends’ trees and donate their points to help them grow, or conversely, collect from friends if their points are not collected on time. To an extent, the platform “gamifies” the positive externalities of green behaviors by persuading individuals to become increasingly conscious and attentive to their points. This involves a different, albeit effective strategy, whereby an intangible incentive (green points) is made tangible by Ant Financial, leading to a feeling of self-efficacy

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regarding climate mitigation measures (Lehner and Simlinger 2019). The user bears no cost in gaining the points, other than the one associated with their green consumption patterns.

Once the virtual tree is fully grown after sowing, watering and caring for the tree, Ant plants a real tree in partnership with the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology Foundation (SEE) and other NGOs in desertified areas of western China. To date, Alipay Ant Forest has recorded strong results, demonstrating the possibilities that nudging individuals towards more sustainable behaviors may have towards climate mitigation. Six months after the platform was launched, it was already used by 200 million people. By March 2020, this number has grown to more than 550 million users (Ant Financial 2020). As Ant Forest continues to grow, Alipay is leveraging the popularity of its platform to scale its green initiative beyond emissions reduction to promote and fund poverty alleviation measures in China.

B. Impacts to Date: Exponential Growth and Environmental Focus

1. Avoided carbon emissions

Alipay Ant Forest is a tool to promote citizen engagement in climate change mitigation by promoting low-carbon lifestyles among its users. Initially, the platform presented nine activities that granted individuals ‘green energy points’, tapping into two types of emission reduction possibilities1: transportation and paper use2.

In the pilot phase of Alipay Ant Forest, the following activities awarded individuals green energy points:

Off-line mobile payments (e.g, buying movie tickets and train tickets online

5 g of CO2 Walking NA

Online payment of utilities (water, electricity, and gas bills)

262 g of CO2

Making appointments online (i.e, payment of traffic violation fines)

NA

Public transportation

80 g of CO2Electronic Toll Collection payment

NA

1 Alipay Ant Forest rewards actions belonging to two distinct categories: emissions avoided in the transportation sector, mainly by reducing fossil fuel consumption, and emissions avoided by opting for paper alternatives, particularly the “reduction of industrial energy consumption during the use and production of paper”. Nine different activities were chosen that could be accounted for within these categories, for example, the online payment for water supply, electricity and gas bills belongs to both categories, walking on the other hand, only on the transportation category. Based on these calculations, Ant Forest has a data acquisition algorithm that ensures that necessary data for every participant behavior is measured and awarded, with prior consent of users. Ant Financial recognizes that this calculation methods provide a good foundation for measuring individual carbon emissions avoided, not reduced, as it only measures behaviors that are rewarded and not the net reduction of emissions by users.

2 Tenhunen and Penttinen (2010), for example, assess the carbon footprint of paper vs. electronic invoicing, and detect a percentage of carbon emis-sions avoided by switching to e-invoicing.

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In 2018, Alipay Ant Forest expanded to include nine new low-carbon scenes, including the exchange of second-hand goods through platforms like Xianyu3, bicycle ride-sharing, consumption of energy-efficient appliances and online registration, among others.

For each activity, a baseline scenario “that reason-ably represents greenhouse gas emissions that would occur in the absence of the activity” was identified, according to Alipay Ant Forest’s calcu-lation methodology. The difference between this baseline and the emissions of encouraged activities allows the calculation of carbon emis-sions being avoided. These calculations were done with the support of the China Beijing Envi-ronment Exchange, and are based on existing methodologies such as the Clean Development Mechanism and the Chinese Certified Emission Reduction (CCER).

2. Afforestation activities

In addition to encouraging green lifestyles, Alipay Ant Forest conducts large-scale tree planting activities, long considered a priority in China. As of March 2020, 122 million trees have been planted in partnership with local non-prof-it organizations4 as a result of Ant users’ carbon reduction activities (Xuanyi 2020).

Additionally, as of October 2018, and in part-nership with the National Forest and Grassland Administration and the China Green Founda-tion, users can receive an official certificate and count their fully-grown virtual trees towards the country’s legal obligation for citizens “to plan three trees each year” (CHINA Plus 2018).

Ant has further leveraged the popularity of their afforestation efforts by making them even more tangible to users by installing remote sensing cameras in the areas where trees are planted. Users’ access to these images, as well as to satel-lite imagery, not only confirms Ant’s pledge to plant the virtual trees in real life, but it makes

reforestation activities a tangible effect of user’s behaviors.

UN Champions of the Earth

In September 2019, Ant Forest was recognized with the “Champions of the Earth” award, the United Nations highest environmental honor. Under the “Inspiration and Action” category, Ant Forest was highlighted as a green initiative that “fundamentally [redesigns] how we inter-act with the planet” by leveraging technology to harness positive change (Inger Andersen, Executive Director UNEP). Particularly, the award praises Ant Forest as China’s ‘largest private sector tree-planting initiative’.

Source: “Chinese Initiative Ant Forest wins UN Champions of the Earth award”, UNEP (19 Sep 2019)

In turn, this contributes to user’s loyalty and awareness of the fact that their virtual trees are in fact being planted. By giving users a concrete milestone in their quest towards sustainability - the possibility of planting a tree - people can feel they are not merely interacting with a digi-tal platform, but actually contributing to making China greener.

Image 2 – Alipay Ant Forest: From Seedlings to Trees via Satellite Imagery

Source: Provided by Ant Financial

3 Xianyu is an online marketplace for the exchange of second-hand goods.

4 China Green Foundation, SEE Foundation, ELION Charitable Foundation, Alashan Ecological Foundation

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C. Further Impacts: Ant’s contribution to Eco-logical Poverty Alleviation

Alipay Ant Forest has gradually expanded beyond environmental protection, branching into more areas of social impact. It is current-ly testing whether its mobile platform could promote poverty alleviation measures by lever-aging the environmental biodiversity of the areas where current afforestation programs take place in. The initial idea is to work along-

side local communities living in the protected areas to advance sustainable rural development activities, such as the commercialization of eco-products, and to promote sustainable use of resources through conservation and research activities. To this moment, it has led to the crea-tion of 400,000 ‘green’ jobs, through two models of economic poverty alleviation: “public welfare protected areas” and “ecological economic forests” (UNFCCC, 2020).

Pingwu County Pilot - Commercialization Avenues for Small-Scale Honey Farmers

An example of Ant’s incursions into economic poverty alleviation include the Pingwu County pilot, a rural cooperative in West China that was established in 2018 for the environmentally-friendly production of honey. For this pilot, Alipay Ant Forest offers users the possibility to protect one square meter of land with their green energy points and also helps local famers sell sustainably produced honey through Taobao, an e-commerce Marketplace. To date, Taobao has hosted more than 150,000 livestream sales, where sellers show customers through live video their products for marketing and commercialization purposes for agricultural workers, enabling the development of new services to connect interested buyers with sellers in rural areas (Chou 2019b). Eco-friendly products could also find sales channels through Alipay Ant Forest and reach more potential buyers.

Linking biodiversity conservation with poverty alleviation presents a global challenge; a recur-rent debate in the environmental sector, and a latent concern of developing countries, has been how to overcome the apparent dichoto-my between conservation and economic devel-opment. While no causal link has been widely acknowledged between biodiversity degradation or conservation and poverty, the international community has established as a goal that biodi-versity conservation efforts should also contrib-ute to overall poverty alleviation (Convention on

Biological Diversity, 1992 & Millennium Ecosys-tem Assessment, 2005). Indeed, recent measure-ments suggest that areas within China with more than 30% of forest cover have a 20% lower GDP per capita than the national average (Zheng et al. 2019). At the global level, although with some exceptions, it seems to be the same: “there is mounting evidence to suggest that, at a variety of scales and in many different ways, biodiversi-ty and poverty do coincide” (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010).

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5 Sea buckthorn is an authentic Chinese native plant. 80% of sea buckthorn forests are distributed in 12 provinces (regions) of China, especially in key areas such as Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai. A three-year-old Hippophae rhamnoides root system can extend up to 5-6 meters. The area of sand fixation and soil retention exceeds 10 square meters, which can reduce surface water and soil loss by 75% and reduce wind erosion by 85%.

Conservation practitioners and researchers have been working to imagine new instruments and models to foster conservation while also supporting the economic development of the inhabitants of biodiversity rich areas. Several initiatives have emerged within China to attain this objective, such as non-timber product commercialization, community forestry, nature-based tourism, payment for ecosystem services,

protected area jobs, and agroforestry (Secre-tariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010; Fatoumata Diallo 2019). The possibility of leveraging innovations based on digital technol-ogies towards the eradication of poverty, such as Alipay Ant Forest’s vision on ecological poverty alleviation, present the opportunity to improve the lives of people in areas where Ant conducts its efforts.

Eco-economic forest model: growing rich forests on the red ground

Another new model being explored by Ant is the eco-economic forest model. Under this prop-osition, the objective is to plant forests with ecological and economic value for poor areas in the Central and Western regions. The model starts with large-scale planting of sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) and abides by the principle of “adjusting to local conditions and suitable trees”. On one hand, this type of tree contributes to wind and sand prevention and helps conserve water and soil, contributing to the ecological sustainable development of this regions. On the other hand, the commercialization of products based on sea buckthorn – particularly of its fruit, which is rich in vitamin C and can be used to produce and process high-end food and health products – creates jobs for people in need. The output value of an acre of sea buckthorn land is as high as 1,000 yuan, and the income of farmers in poor areas harvesting sea buckthorn is more than 5 times higher than that of sowing land. The re-investment of a portion of the revenues from these prod-ucts contribute to the protection and conservation of these forests. Thus, in this way, this model promotes development in poor areas, while prioritizing ecological protection in a virtuous circle of economic development5.

On November 19, 2018, the first eco-economic forest species went live on Alipay’s Ant Forest. 3.14 million users exchanged green points to grow more than 23,500 mu of sea buckthorn in a day. On December 19, 2019, the first ecological product “MA Sea Buckthorn” beverage, developed on the basis of this model, was officially launched for sale, with 100,000 pieces sold in more than 100 minutes. Each bottle of “MA sea buckthorn” priced at 9.9 yuan, except for the cost of raw material harvesting and manufacturers’ production and processing, the rest will all be donated to the special fund established by the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation for ecological and environmental protection in the central and western regions and poverty alleviation.

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II. Making it happen: institutional and policy enablers for citizen action towards carbon reduction

Besides the unique design and features of Alipay Ant Forest, China’s growing leadership in envi-ronmental protection have made the applica-tion not only relevant, but seen as a necessary and worthwhile endeavor to combat climate degradation. The country’s consolidated efforts to achieve greener development for China have materialized through guidelines, regulations and strategic policies aimed to incentivize and align changes amongst the private sector, local governments and national ministries towards greener growth. Amongst priority objectives of Chinese environmental policies are emis-sion reduction, natural resources conservation, renewable energy resources, and the promotion of a circular economy (The State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2016).

China’s recognition that its transformation towards an “ecological civilization” requires economic and social transformation, and that economic growth and environmental protec-tion can go hand in hand, has driven a national change strategy through structural adjustments to achieve green growth. From declaring an inter-nal war on pollution, establishing green finance as an international priority during its presidency of the G20, and becoming one of two countries contributing the most to greening efforts world-wide, China, in spite of being the largest green-house gas emitter globally, is pursuing tangible changes and innovations to remedy and combat climate change.

While there is no specific empirical way to prove whether a particular policy has had a significant effect on aiding Alipay Ant Forest’s success, this section covers the policy, regulatory and institu-tional enablers in the fields of green finance and green fintech that have shaped China’s green development, and thus the normative backdrop in which Alipay Ant Forest has achieved the impact described in earlier sections.

A. Green Finance

Green finance, officially defined as “financial services provided for economic activities that are supportive of environment improvement, climate change mitigation and more efficient resource utilization”, is one of the areas where government directives have played an important role in incentivizing sectoral change towards climate mitigation (“Guidelines for Establish-ing the Green Financial System” 2016). National commitments to green the economy have driven innovation-based transformations, often precip-itating change upon companies and organiza-tions, others working alongside relevant actors to carve a path towards change.

Elevating green finance as a key policy commit-ment (see figure 2 below for a timeline of actions) has made possible the development of a finan-cial market cognizant of environmental and social risks. In fact, China is the first country in the world with a clear national policy directive to “create an all-encompassing green financial system” capable of bridging the funding gap needed to achieve green development (“Estab-lishing China’s Green Financial System” 2017). Furthermore, the ability to put in place pilot projects on green finance further confirms the government’s intentions to continuously find ways to promote green finance.

Green Finance Pilot Zones

In 2017, the State Council announced it would set up five pilot zones to test green finance reforms and innovations in the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guizhou, and Xinjiang. Different ministerial agencies were tasked to develop a plan for these areas, includ-ing modern agriculture and clean energy through green finance, infrastructure in big data informa-tion sharing, ecological environment and pover-ty alleviation through green finance (Paulson Institute 2019). These pilot zones provided insti-tutions with a range of incentives to test whether new or existing mechanisms could be successful in financing and advancing various climate miti-gation strategies (Reuters 2017).

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Figure 2. Above contains a timeline of some of the policies and regulations that have been influential in determining China’s financial system transition. Though they are not explored in depth, this figure illustrates the continuous change in regulations and policies, illustrative of the government’s continuous top-down approach to greening the financial sector.

According to the Paulson Institute (2019), it is expected that the innovations tested during the pilots will be applied nationally “to unify green finance standards and improve the commercial sustainability of green finance”. To date, the most “fruitful case” is that of the Zhejiang province pilot for its “key success pillars in place including a sound governance system to encourage green finance development, a growing demand for green industry and an established working rela-tionship with China’s Green Finance Committee for technical support”. These pilots were extend-ed into a second phase in 2019, after initial successful results (Jia 2018).

B. Green FinTech

China’s top-down approach to engineer a green economy has also coincided with the develop-ment of the fintech (short for financial tech-nologies) industry, defined as “companies that combine financial services with modern, innova-tive technologies” (Dorfleitner et al. 2016, 2017). According to the Digital Disruption (2016) report, fintech companies thrive in China due to the high penetration of digitization, quick growth of internet users, and prudent yet inclu-sive regulatory frameworks than in other coun-tries. In fact, China is home to four of the five largest fintech companies in the world (Gulam-huseinwala, 2016). In a context of high political support for internet-based finance (Ngai et al. 2016), Chinese technology giants have created “all-encompassing platforms with the aim of embedding their services – financial and non-fi-nancial solutions – into customers’ lives”. (“The Rise of FinTech in China” 2016). As they dive into new technology frontiers like blockchain or artificial intelligence, fintech companies are also starting to explore how they could contribute to green finance. Recent pilots around the world are showing how this sector has the potential to develop new business models that “can both reduce the cost and improve the prospects of achieving the objectives of the Paris Agree-ment and the SDGs, [...], including supply chain

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transparency, identity and financial inclusion, property rights, expansion of renewable ener-gy, decentralization of electrical power systems, carbon credit trading and improved access to climate finance” (Nassiry 2018).

In fact, Ant Financial can be considered as a fintech company that has both contributed to the expansion of financial services for custom-ers, but has also played an important role in shaping and innovating the current green finance environment (Qi 2018). Drawing from this mix of green financial system guidance and fintech promotion, China has managed to create an appealing environment for innovation on green fintech. Yet it is expected for the regu-latory environment to evolve in the near future for this new industry (Ngai et al. 2016).

Understanding this enabling environment is crucial to fully capture, besides the appeal of the Ant Forest platform, how and why this plat-form is an important endeavor of Ant Finan-cial’s. Particularly, taking a look at how over the past four years different guidelines, regulations and strategic policies have been introduced, and how private companies and individuals alike can contribute towards nationwide priorities.

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6 It is worth noting that the countries in the study were chosen given their status as large greenhouse gas emitters, regional diversity, variety in develop-ment level, and availability of carbon emission data, providing thus an interesting panorama for what scalability of a green mobile initiative to promote citizen action could look like in other places of the world.

III. Scaling abroad? The potential for citizen action towards carbon reduction in other markets

In June 2019, the first platform designed and based on Alipay Ant Forest, “GCash Forest” was launched in the Philippines. With the goal of combating deforestation, and similarly, offering energy points by rewarding a given set of behav-iors, GCash, a leading mobile wallet in the Philip-pines is leveraging the Alipay Ant Forest model to incentivize individual behavior changes for climate change mitigation. This first endeavor outside of mainland China signals to the scala-bility of Alipay Ant Forest; a model that if widely replicated, could result in important citizen-led climate mitigation actions.

Given Alipay Ant Forest’s trajectory and results to date, it is worth examining the impact that could result from scaling this initiative to other coun-tries in the world. To do so, a multiple regression model was built to estimate the potential market size and results of a platform like Alipay Ant Forest in seven other countries6: India, Germany, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. This model estimates the market size, potential emissions avoided as a result from individual behavior changes (see Annex 1 “A study of impacts - methods and limita-tions for modeling” for a detailed description of the methodology). Providing a preliminary estimate

on the impact that scaling green initiatives like Alipay Ant Forest to other countries of the world could have - both in terms of number of users andavoided emissions - highlights the potential of digital platforms for individual-based climate mitigation measures.

A. Estimating Market Potential

In under ten years, it can be estimated that the market size for an innovation such as Alipay Ant Forest, would roughly be equal to 1,003 million users under the “trend” scenario, 1,058 million users under “optimistic”, and 945 million users under the “conservative” scenario - these three scenarios were constructed to describe at, above and below the baseline calculated. In any of these cases, the market size is roughly equivalent to three times the current popula-tion of the United States, a sizeable number of individuals that would voluntarily change their behaviors in order to reduce their carbon emis-sions and contribute to tree-planting activities. All else equal, the yearly rate of growth would be 7 million new users.

In fact, as can be seen in Figure 4 below, the largest share for new, potential users of a plat-form geared towards incentivizing citizen action for carbon reduction could be concentrated in India, Brazil and the United States.

Figure 3. Total users (Population (millions) 2020-2030) Figure 4. Share of emissions reduction by country

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B. Estimating emissions reduction potential

According to Alipay Ant Forest’s pilot results, users avoided 4.9 kilos of CO2 equivalent missions per person, per year, as a product of the green behaviors they adopted. This is equivalent to 0.064% of per capita emissions in China or to 0.086% of per capita emissions in China’s trans-portation sector7.

Under this baseline scenario and based on popu-lation projections for the countries studied, it

was estimated that for the period from 2020 to 2030, 8.4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions could be avoided in these countries, with an average annual value of 0.8 million tonnes8(see Figure 5).

(see Figure 5). It is worth noting that this model only takes into consideration the behaviors and number of users under limited low-carbon activ-ities during the first nine months9 since Alipay Ant Forest’s launch, reason why these estimates may be underestimating the magnitude of potential avoided emissions.

Year Brazil Germany India JapanSouth Korea

United Kingdom

United States

Total Emissions Reduction

2020 63,065.97 28,056.17 123,904.18 118,725.50 14,475.82 19,985.53 381,916.69 750,129.86

2021 65,372.33 26,671.26 126,574.66 121,714.17 14,865.90 18,860.82 381,117.53 755,176.67

2022 67,631.80 26,499.74 130,300.57 115,784.28 16,229.42 19,021.38 385,827.53 761,294.72

2023 67,458.77 25,669.72 134,492.94 113,516.44 16,727.86 18,164.35 380,840.73 756,870.80

2024 70,245.56 25,853.70 139,855.03 111,270.09 16,498.92 17,688.85 374,063.87 755,476.03

2025 71,347.58 24,949.23 147,131.12 108,069.36 16,278.27 17,295.20 371,897.85 756,968.61

2026 73,830.88 23,896.52 149,408.54 107,875.62 16,380.33 16,767.93 373,017.44 761,177.26

2027 75,012.92 23,764.10 168,606.77 102,945.76 16,751.77 16,409.37 362,784.37 766,275.07

2028 75,520.07 23,363.94 187,486.96 106,029.05 15,823.23 15,206.39 349,049.75 772,479.38

2029 80,920.17 24,592.79 189,740.50 110,350.90 16,051.04 15,396.95 352,893.83 789,946.18

2030 82,309.23 23,107.03 200,237.36 105,699.83 15,318.84 14,035.21 343,903.83 784,611.33

Total 792,715 276,424 1,697,738 1,221,980 175,401 188,831 4,057,313 8,410,405

Figure 5. Emission Reduction Potential Per Country (tCO2e)

7 Muntean, M., Guizzardi, D., Schaaf, E., Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Olivier, J.G.J., Vignati, E. Fossil CO2 emissions of all world countries - 2018 Report, EUR 29433 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2018. Otherwise known as EDGARv5.0.

8 This uses the factor of 0.064% reductions per capita, modeled based on Ant Forest baseline during its pilot phase

9 At this time, green energy points were awarded for only nine actions, including: electronic payment of metro tickets, electronic toll collection, hospital registration fee, electronic train tickets, electronic payment of household utilities, electronic payment of movie tickets, traffic fines and penalties, other offline payments and walking.

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Assumption Brazil Germany JapanSouth Korea

United Kingdom

United States China Average

Single trip 9.20% 1.10% 5.10% 1.10% 1.80% 9.90% 2.10% 4.30%

Round trip 18.30% 2.10% 10.10% 2.20% 3.60% 19.80% 4.20% 8.60%

Figure 6: Modal shift measures: Alipay Ant Forest emission reductions as a proportion of public transportation* related emissions (per capita, annual)

Furthermore, given that most of the actions awarded through Alipay Ant Forest relate to shifts in transportation patterns, one can view these emission reductions in light of the volume of emissions corresponding to local public trans-port in each of the countries. In order to do so, research was undertaken to identify the percent-age of total national emissions generated by public transportation in order to calculate the number of CO2 emissions generated per passen-ger in one year. This calculation was done under two scenarios: 1) assuming single and, 2) assum-ing roundtrip travel per capita on every day of the year.

Drawing these comparisons makes clear that the modal shifts encouraged by Alipay Ant Forest represent a significant proportion of annual emis-sions per passenger tied to public transportation emissions. Particularly for the United States and Brazil, it can be noted that the emissions avoid-ed because of platforms like Alipay Ant Forest, constitute a significant share of public trans-portation emissions. This comparison signals to the fact that simple shifts in behavior patterns, particularly in carbon intensive industries (as is transportation) do significantly impact national emissions, but this impact is even more obvious when looking at specific sectors.

10 For these calculations, the emissions per passenger trip in public bus transportation were taken, when available. This choice was made in light of the volume of emissions that this mode of transportation represents in China, as well as on the modal shift measures in transportation awarded through Ant Forest. However, it is worth noting that the magnitude of these percentages depend on the extent to which buses are the main modes of transpor-tation in countries’ public transportation schemes.

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IV. Main Findings

Green mobile platforms are poised as power-ful mechanisms to inform and encourage citizen action towards carbon reduction. Alipay’s Ant Forest has incentivized over 550 million people to adopt greener, more sustain-able behaviors and to become active agents of nature-based solutions through its mobile plat-form, resulting in avoided emissions estimated at over 11 million tons of CO2 (Xuanyi 2020). Providing individuals with tangible and visual information on the carbon emissions associated with everyday activities has a positive impact in encouraging green behaviors.

Digital technologies are providing new avenues for citizens to become active agents for nature-based solutions to climate change. Alipay Ant Forest’s interactive design for environ-mental protection play a crucial role in breaching the attitude-behavior gap to generate individual actions for climate change mitigation. Behavior change is more likely when individuals feel their actions have a visible and tangible impact. Alipay Ant Forest users’ ability to see their trees grow amidst a forest planted by other users, contrib-utes to the recognition that individual actions are significant, but also, that seemingly isolated actions contribute to larger collective impacts.

There are opportunities to bridge the dichoto-my between conservation and poverty reduc-tion in China by leveraging private sector innovations towards social good. Mobile appli-cations, amongst these green fintech applica-tions, have the opportunity to contribute to the economic empowerment and ecological conser-vation of rural communities by enabling and providing access to the digital market and their user base. As a point of convergence for actors interested in pairing environmental protection and poverty alleviation, platforms like Alipay Ant Forest have the potential to link individuals who want to support biodiversity conservation efforts, with rural communities looking for commerciali-zation avenues for sustainable products.

The overall enabling environment towards innovation in China, characterized through its multiple policies focused on greening the financial sector, have developed the condi-tions for green fintech to emerge at scale in China. A policy approach defined by direct guidance to financial sector players, and govern-ment-sponsored experimentation via green finance pilot zones has contributed to China’s leadership in green finance. China’s fintech sector has emerged from an enabling environment, contributing to the consolidation and growth of multiple fintechs, amongst these green fintechs.

Up to 8.6% of emissions tied to public trans-portation could be avoided in the seven coun-tries modeled in this study if similar green initiatives were to be implemented over the 2020-2030 period. Exploring the potential impacts that scaling a platform like Alipay Ant Forest could have on additional countries makes clear the potential impact of green initiatives to incentivize individual actions for climate change mitigation. Particularly, this model estimates that the largest share of potential users of a mobile application to incentivize citizen action towards carbon reduction, could be concentrat-ed in India and Brazil, and that over 600 million trees could be planted. However, to incentivize a shift towards lighter carbon lifestyles, there is a need to adapt the design of green initiatives to the specific behavioral patterns of citizens of each of the countries.

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Figure 2. Methodological process for the scaled emissions model14

11 Due to data availability, disaggregated information was only available during the pilot’s six months. At this time, green energy points were awarded for only nine actions, including: electronic payment of metro tickets, electronic toll collection, hospital registration fee, electronic train tickets, electronic payment of household utilities, electronic payment of movie tickets, traffic fines and penalties, other offline payments and walking

12 In this report fossil CO2 emissions include sources from fossil fuel use (combustion, flaring), industrial processes (cement, steel, chemicals and urea) and product use. Please note that in the analysis presented in this report no short cycle carbon CO2 is included in any sector for EDGAR data. EDGARv5.0 uses international activity data, mainly energy balance statistics of IEA (2017) for 1970-2015 to estimate CO2 from fossil fuel consump-tion. These emissions are extended (FT approach) to 2016 and 2017 using BP statistics. The respective sectoral breakdowns of emissions for 2015 are extrapolated to 2016 and 2017. Updates for 2016 and 2017 for cement, lime, ammonia and ferroalloys production are based on USGS statistics, urea production and consumption are based on IFA statistics, associated gas used from flaring from GGFR/NOAA, steel production from world steel and cement clinker production from UNFCCC (2018b). For the other sectors with lower contributions to the global CO2 emissions, the time series in ED-GARv4.3.2 have been extended for the period 2013-2017 using proxy data and relative changes in activity data compared to 2012, reported in recent data sources.

13 The following datasets were used to build the model:

14 Total historical fossil CO2 emissions in MtCO2 by country from 1970 to 2017.

15 Total historical fossil emissions in MtCO2 for the transport sector by country from 1970 to 2017.

16 Per capita emissions expressed in tCO2/cap/yr from 1990 to 2017.

17 Smartphone penetration of each country expressed as a percentage for the years 2017 and 2013.

18 Smartphone purchases expressed as a percentage of the population using smartphones for 2013 and 2015.

scenario mimics Alipay Ant Forest’s user growth during its first six months as a baseline, while the “conservative” and “optimistic” scenarios are estimates on margins 5% greater and lesser than this baseline.

Second, to estimate the carbon emissions avoid-ed by users in each of these countries, the model assumes a trajectory equal to that of Alipay Ant Forest during its first six months of operation. This baseline is understood on a per capita basis,

and was extrapolated to the other countries of study assuming that it would be fixed through-out the years.

Limitations of the model

The model does not take into account the potential weight of extrinsic and intrinsic moti-vations to adopt environmental behaviors based on the national context, such as the impact of

Annex A - A study of impacts: modeling methodology

The model is focused on providing a preliminary idea on the impact that scaling green initiatives like Alipay Ant Forest to other countries of the world would have - both in terms of number of users, avoided emissions, and reforestation potential. To estimate these figures, the model built extrapolates the results obtained during

Alipay Ant Forest’s first six-months of opera-tion11, in order to make projections for each of the countries being studied. These, coupled with World Bank population projections, the Emis-sion Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)12, and Data Reportal - a repository on mobile application and platform user growth - were used as the main data sources13 for the model.

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Ant’s gamification effect as an incentive to utilize the app. Furthermore, the propension to use social media and apps differs, and e-commerce and smartphone usage doesn’t fully capture this variance. In other words, the adoption of inter-net-based channels and media differ dramati-cally, particularly of mobile banking solutions. Accessibility, availability, and affordability of technologies, as well as cultural context, ought to be considered in order to achieve more nuanced results. The assumptions the model is based on are too broad to reach conclusive results, thus, this model only provides estimates both for market size and emissions reduced. Second, the model doesn’t take into consideration the intrin-sic market development in each of these coun-tries, but makes the assumption that the market size for green mobile initiatives would equal the market size of mobile payment applications generally. Although it is clear, to an extent, what drives a user in China to use Alipay Ant Forest, there is no way to predict whether individu-als in other markets would be as enthused and engaged by a similar application. Both the press-ing nature of climate change in China, as well as the “virality” caused by the gamification and social network features of the platform may not be as effective in other countries.

19 Relational data from Ant Forest’s emissions model.

20 This mathematical model was based on Eck et al. 2017 and Fox 2018. The adjusted R-squared for this model was 0.9865, indicating that 98.6% of global transportation emissions are explained by the emissions in the countries analyzed.

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