The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2016–2019
Ant Forest turns low-carbon habits into a game — 500M users plant 100M real trees
Alipay's 2016 app turns walking, cycling and e-bills into 'green energy' for virtual trees; Ant Financial plants real ones — 500M users, 100M+ trees by 2019.
Alipay (支付宝) · Ant Financial (蚂蚁金服)
What it had to solve
In 2016, most Chinese accepted climate change but did little about it, and Ant Financial's Alipay wanted users to open the app daily. Environmental behavior was invisible and abstract; the company needed a way to make personal carbon-cutting tangible inside a payment app.
How it works
In August 2016, Ant Financial planted a seed inside Alipay: a mini-app where every low-carbon act — walking, cycling, paying utility bills online — produces 'green energy.' The energy ripens like a crop, and users must log in to collect it before it expires, or watch friends take it.
When enough energy accumulates, a virtual tree matures and Ant Financial funds a real one in arid northern China, planted with NGOs and shown to the user through satellite photos and certificates. The mechanics were borrowed from social games on purpose: urgency, stealing, watering and visible progress.
The numbers surprised the team itself: more than 200 million users within six months, and by April 2019, 500 million users had grown 100 million real trees covering roughly 900 square kilometers. Alipay's daily active users rose 40 percent in the six months after launch.
In 2019 the UN gave Ant Forest its Champions of the Earth award, its highest environmental honor, and the model traveled: a Philippine version, GCash Forest, launched the same year. A carbon-reduction habit, invisible by nature, had become China's largest participatory tree-planting program.
Why it lands
- Energy that ripens and expires created a daily habit loop inside a payment app.
- Friends could collect each other's energy, turning individual virtue into social play.
- Real trees with satellite proof made the virtual reward verifiable, not symbolic.
- The public carbon accounting made the claim 'you planted a tree' defensible.
- It aligned business and good: daily engagement for Alipay, visible reforestation for the public.
What it did
Within six months it passed 200 million users; by April 2019 it had 500 million users who had grown 100 million real trees covering about 900 square kilometers. Alipay's daily active users rose 40% in the six months after launch, and the initiative won the UN's 2019 Champions of the Earth award, later spreading to the Philippines as GCash Forest.
What you can take
Make a good act visible and playful: when the reward is a tangible tree with proof, a habit becomes a game, and the daily-app engagement the company needed came as a byproduct of doing good.
Since then
Ant Forest kept compounding: by August 2019 it had passed 122 million trees and 7.9 million tonnes of avoided carbon, and it earned the 2019 Champions of the Earth award. The model went abroad with GCash Forest in the Philippines, and Chinese tech companies adopted similar gamified green features. Critics noted the accounting only rewarded low-carbon acts without tracking high-carbon ones, and asked whether game rewards truly change behavior — but the campaign remains the reference point for turning environmental contribution into a mass consumer product.
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