Ant Forest : The Gamification of Environmental Awareness via Alipay

Reading Time : 4 Minutes 

REVENUE WILL COME WHEN YOU FOCUS ON ADDING VALUE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS WITHIN YOUR ECOSYSTEM

We were introduced a very cute mini-app within the Alipay ecosystem, called Ant Forest “蚂蚁森林”. 

Users of Alipay are rewarded for making small, environmentally friendly decisions in their daily lives through “green energy” points, and those points can be redeemed to plant trees in areas of the country in need of vegetation! 

Ant Forest User Interface, a Gamified Element for Environmental Awareness

So as users, we can collect green energy points through various activities like taking the bus, not accepting receipts, cycle with the e-bike, or walking thousands of steps. The Alipay app will then identify all of these usage within the ecosystem to be energy saving activities, therefore providing you with even more points! When you have collected sufficiently, you will then be able to purchase a tree virtually and plant it at a dessert of your choice. 

Alipay Ant Forest users can see satellite images of their trees in real-time. The image in the center shows a patch of land in Inner Mongolia before Ant Forest began planting trees, while the image to its right shows the same location in 2017 — the stripes are newly planted saxaul trees.

With this crazy initiative, Alipay users have apparently planted 100M trees in China! What started out as a pet project among internal team members of Alibaba, has become a full fledged working solution that can benefit the country. 

All Within the Ecosystem

One of the participants asked the Ant Forest team, how does Alibaba earn money from it? The answer was pretty simple. By building value added services that can benefit mankind, this project indirectly encourages more usage of the Alipay app. This will then translate to a higher transaction rate for Alipay which eventually would benefit the group in a whole.

The Mission of Ant Forest

Afterthoughts

Alibaba has continuously surprised me with new facts everyday on how their company is run by a strong culture of helping and giving back to the community. 

I would end this post with a powerful quote from an Ant Forest user which was shared by our facilitator, Chandee.

“I may never see the tree which I have grown, but I believe one day I will breathe the air which it has flown”

Read more on what happened along the journey thus far :

• Read Pre-Day 1 : (A Day Using China’s Tech Ecosystem)
• Read Day 1 :  (Hot Pot Anyone?)
• Read Day 2, Part 1/3 : (Tao Bao Village, A Thriving Rural eCommerce)
• Read Day 2, Part 2/3 : (eCommerce Overview of Malaysia vs China)
• Read Day 2, Part 3/3 : (Building an eCommerce Team)
• Special Intermission : (The 996 Work Culture in China)
• Read Day 3, (The 50 Billion RMB  Muji for Snacks in China)
• Read Day 4, Part 1/2 : (A Glimpse of an E-Wallet Future in Malaysia)
• Read Day 4, Part 2/2 : (Ant Forest, Gamification of Environmental Awareness)

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