User:Yiting Sun/sandbox

Ant Forest (Chinese: 蚂蚁森林) is a scheme launched on Alipay mobile client by Ant Financial Services Group in August 2016. Combining the Internet, finance and a low-carbon lifestyle, it is a personal carbon account as well as public benefit activity: if users walk, travel by public transport, pay utility fees online, pay traffic tickets online, make online hospital registration, book tickets online and generate other low-carbon activities, they would reduce corresponding carbon emissions. These would be counted and converted into virtual "green energy" and users could use these energy to raise a virtual tree in their Ant Forest account. When enough energy has been earned to grow a virtual tree, it would be converted into a real tree and planted in some real areas in China by people supported by Ant Financial Services Group and its partners. After that, the virtual tree in users' Ant Forest account have to be re-raise.

Until May 2017, there was about two hundred million users in Ant Forest, equivalent to 3% of the world's population. Until August 2017, 1.22 million tons carbon emissions have been reduced totally and 10.25 million entity trees have been planted. Users could see the trees they planted through satellite map. According to Gong Zhang, a former NASA scientist and the founder of GAGO Inc., it should be hard to see the saplings because of the low resolution of satellite, but millions of saplings have been planted so we could see the changes they brought to the world. Alipay hopes to cultivate and encourage users to stick to a low-carbon lifestyle through this way.

Development
In 5th September 2017, Ant Forest released a plan called "Planet Blue" at its "Bluer Sky" forum of the public benefit activities week. This plan would open product capabilities and technology platform to the whole society and urge everyone to participate in a green future. This project tries to transform itself into an incubator of social charity innovation. The CEO of Ant Financial Services Group Xiandong Jin said:" Public benefit activities are right around us. The power of mobile Internet technology is available to everyone and makes everyone's actions into possible. Technology is the greatest public welfare of this era". He also pointed out that mobile Internet allows individuals to translate their daily low-carbon behaviors into green energy, whilst the use of technologies such as remote sensing satellite and artificial intelligent technology could help commonweal organizations to manage forest ecology better and make public benefits more real and transparent. The new plan of Ant Forest would encourage more access to low-carbon scenarios and await the NPO, government agencies, international organizations and other partners to join into this public benefit innovation.

According to Wang Zu, the product manager of the Ant Financial Services Group, the plan was more than finding trees and preserves and union of brands, it was a vision of achieving the open of the whole industry chain, which could connect all the green scenes and resources with everyone's actions on the platform.

Cooperation
On January 19, 2017, Ant Financial and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched the world’s first green digital financial alliance during the Davos World Economic Forum, with the aim of harnessing digital technology to promoting financing that addresses global environmental challenges. The collaboration marked the UNEP's first joint venture with a Chinese company since it was established 45 years ago.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released a report on China’s carbon market on February 17 and specifically analyzed Ant Forest, the world’s largest platform for gathering data on individuals' efforts to reduce their carbon footprints. The UNDP’s report said the Chinese platform has “a special significance in enhancing personal contribution to the global response to climate change”.

Reward
Ali Annual Outstanding Public Benefit Activity Project.

Social Implications
Maosheng Duan (the director of the China Carbon Market Research Center Tsinghua University and the former chairman of the executive board of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)) said that Ant Forest have taken a pioneering step towards promoting ordinary people to reduce carbon emissions at consumer-sides. Ant Forest would make more contributions to the environment and public benefits in China and even the world. Also, it would become a typical duplicable project.

Zhenping Huang (the assistant to the president of the Institute For Philanthropy Tsinghua University) believed that in the era of technology, the public benefit activities could reshape personal habits as well as affect cooperations and interactions among social groups profoundly. Such crossover collision provides the most fertile soil to innovation of public benefits.