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Alipay Ant Forest | Narrated by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

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Alipay is one of the world’s most popular online payment and lifestyle platforms. Hailing from China, the platform serves over one billion users worldwide in partnership with its local e-wallet partners.

Alipay’s online and mobile payment platform is used by more than a billion people to pay for everything from groceries, to bike rentals, to wealth management products. In August 2016, the Chinese company turned the power of its digital technology to promote climate action. The Alipay Ant Forest project, launched on the company’s mobile app, rewards its users with “green energy points” each time they take a step to reduce their emissions, such as by biking to work, going paperless and buying sustainable products. These green energy points grow into a virtual tree on the user’s app, which Alipay matches by planting a real tree or protecting a conservation area, in partnership with local NGOs. 

Since its launch, Alipay Ant Forest has attracted over 500 million users, planted 100 million real trees in Northwest China covering a total area of 112,000 hectares, and protected a total area of 12,000 hectares of conservation land.

Learn more: https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/planetary-health/alipay-ant-forest

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Alipay Ant Forest: Using Digital Technologies to Scale up Climate Action | China

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Alipay Ant Forest: Using Digital Technologies to Scale up Climate Action | China

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Summary

Alipay is one of the world's most popular online payment and lifestyle platforms. Hailing from China, the platform serves over one billion users worldwide in partnership with its local e-wallet partners.

Alipay's online and mobile payment platform is used by more than a billion people to pay for everything from groceries, to bike rentals, to wealth management products. In August 2016, the Chinese company turned the power of its digital technology to promote climate action. The Alipay Ant Forest project, launched on the company's mobile app, rewards its users with "green energy points" each time they take a step to reduce their emissions, such as by biking to work, going paperless and buying sustainable products. These green energy points grow into a virtual tree on the user's app, which Alipay matches by planting a real tree or protecting a conservation area, in partnership with local NGOs.

Since its launch, Alipay Ant Forest has attracted over 500 million users, planted 100 million real trees in Northwest China covering a total area of 112,000 hectares, and protected a total area of 12,000 hectares of conservation land. Alipay Ant Forest has also helped create around 400,000 job opportunities and RMB 60 million (USD 8.4 million) in income by working with farmers to plant trees, develop organic agricultural products, and connect them with e-commerce platforms.

Key Facts

The Alipay app is one of the world's most used mobile applications - over a billion users.

Over 500 million people have joined the Alipay Ant Forest green initiative, planting over 100 million trees, which as of August 2019, now cover a total area of 112,000 hectares in Northwest China.

Alipay Ant Forest shows how technology can be applied to foster massive individual efforts to tackle climate change, which represents a meaningful step towards the Sustainable Development Goal 13 - "taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts."

The Problem

The world faces daunting environmental challenges. Increasing pressure on the environment is causing serious damage to ecosystems and threatening the lives of millions of people. Bottom-up approaches are needed to engage people directly in behavioral change and green financing, to complement the top-down climate action initiatives led by governments and non-state actors.

The Solution

Emerging digital technologies can provide a bottom-up approach to address climate change, by providing a measurable, tradable and allocable platform to shift people's daily behavior towards a low-carbon lifestyle. At its core, Alipay Ant Forest encourages people to live a greener lifestyle by integrating a range of low-carbon activities into daily life-such as paying utility bills and purchasing tickets online via a mobile device and walking to work instead of driving.

These behaviors are recorded and converted into "virtual green energy" on the Alipay Ant Forest platform. Once a user's virtual tree has fully grown, Alipay and its philanthropic NGO partners plant a real tree in Northwest China or commit to protect a particular conservation area.

Helping the Planet

Alipay Ant Forest has a double-counting carbon reduction effect-and is a key example of innovative environmental protection in the Internet era. Accumulating points to grow a virtual tree helps facilitate a low-carbon lifestyle, energy savings, and emission reductions. And, planting real trees can help prevent soil erosion and control desertification, while playing a key role in the fight against climate change.

In addition to planting trees, Alipay is exploring other innovative corporate social responsibility models. In September 2017, Alipay Ant Forest launched a land protection project, where users can "adopt" or virtually claim to protect five square meters of conservation land with the support of Alipay and local NGO partners.

Helping People

Alipay helps local farmers generate income from the green economy. The Alipay Ant Forest app has created around 400,000 job opportunities as of August 2019. Alipay hopes to increase farmers' income not only by planting trees, but also by developing organic agricultural products and helping connect partners directly to Alibaba e-commerce platform.

Spillover Effect

Ant Forest has exceeded Alipay's expectations by attracting large numbers of users in a short period of time and eliciting significant behavioral change. Early results indicate a strong potential to use digital technology in collective efforts to safeguard the planet for ourselves and future generations.

The Alipay Ant Forest model could be extended to other regions to encourage more people to adopt low-carbon activities. In June 2019, the leading mobile wallet in the Philippines, GCash has introduced GCash Forest on its app. Inspired by Alipay Ant Forest, GCash Forest enables local users to contribute to reforestation and environmental preservation by adopting low carbon activities in their daily lives. Digital technology innovations, such as Alipay Ant Forest, as part of a wider digital eco-system, could be deployed in addressing many other environmental challenges, in collaboration with governments and other stakeholders.

The Alipay Ant Forest app offers a new way to mobilize people to engage in solving local and global problems. With the accelerating growth of mobile services used by young adults, who are typically most concerned by the impact of climate change, the potential to scale up the impacts of Alipay's Ant Forest app is promising.

Images owned by the activity partners, all rights reserved.

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Alipay Ant Forest: Using Digital Technologies to Scale up Climate Action | China | UNFCCC

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Summary Alipay is one of the world's most popular online payment and lifestyle platforms. Hailing from China, the platform serves over one billion us...

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Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time, marking a significant step towards electric cars becoming as fast to charge as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles.

Electric vehicles are a vital part of action to tackle the climate crisis but running out of charge during a journey is a worry for drivers. The new lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and manufactured by Eve Energy in China on standard production lines.

StoreDot has already demonstrated its "extreme fast-charging" battery in phones, drones and scooters and the 1,000 batteries it has now produced are to showcase its technology to carmakers and other companies. Daimler, BP, Samsung and TDK have all invested in StoreDot, which has raised $130m to date and was named a Bloomberg New Energy Finance Pioneer in 2020.

The batteries can be fully charged in five minutes but this would require much higher-powered chargers than used today. Using available charging infrastructure, StoreDot is aiming to deliver 100 miles of charge to a car battery in five minutes in 2025.

"The number one barrier to the adoption of electric vehicles is no longer cost, it is range anxiety," said Doron Myersdorf, CEO of StoreDot. "You're either afraid that you're going to get stuck on the highway or you're going to need to sit in a charging station for two hours. But if the experience of the driver is exactly like fuelling [a petrol car], this whole anxiety goes away."

"A five-minute charging lithium-ion battery was considered to be impossible," he said. "But we are not releasing a lab prototype, we are releasing engineering samples from a mass production line. This demonstrates it is feasible and it's commercially ready."

Existing Li-ion batteries use graphite as one electrode, into which the lithium ions are pushed to store charge. But when these are rapidly charged, the ions get congested and can turn into metal and short circuit the battery.

The StoreDot battery replaces graphite with semiconductor nanoparticles into which ions can pass more quickly and easily. These nanoparticles are currently based on germanium, which is water soluble and easier to handle in manufacturing. But StoreDot's plan is to use silicon, which is much cheaper, and it expects these prototypes later this year. Myersdorf said the cost would be the same as existing Li-ion batteries.

"The bottleneck to extra-fast charging is no longer the battery," he said. Now the charging stations and grids that supply them need to be upgraded, he said, which is why they are working with BP. "BP has 18,200 forecourts and they understand that, 10 years from now, all these stations will be obsolete, if they don't repurpose them for charging - batteries are the new oil."

Dozens of companies around the world are developing fast-charging batteries, with Tesla, Enevate and Sila Nanotechnologies all working on silicon electrodes. Others are looking at different compounds, such as Echion which uses niobium oxide microparticles.

Tesla boss Elon Musk tweeted on Monday: "Battery cell production is the fundamental rate-limiter slowing down a sustainable energy future. Very important problem."

"I think such fast-charging batteries will be available to the mass market in three years," said Prof Chao-Yang Wang, at the Battery and Energy Storage Technology Center at Pennsylvania State University in the US. "They will not be more expensive; in fact, they allow automakers to downsize the onboard battery while still eliminating range anxiety, thereby dramatically cutting down the vehicle battery cost."

Research by Wang's group is being developed by the company EC Power, which he founded. It carefully increases the temperature of the battery to 60C, which enables the lithium ions to move faster, but avoids the damage to the battery usually caused by heat. He said this allowed a full charge in 10 minutes.

Wang said new research published in Nature Energy on Monday showed this battery could be both affordable and eliminate range anxiety. "Finally we are achieving parity with gasoline vehicles in both cost and convenience. We have the technology for $25,000 electric cars that race like luxury sport cars, have 10-minute rechargeability and are safer than any currently on the market."

Wang noted that fast charging must also be repeatable at least 500 times without degrading the battery to give it a reasonable life and that the EC power battery can do so 2,500 times. Myersdorf said the StoreDot battery could be recharged 1,000 cycles while retaining 80% of original capacity.

Anna Tomaszewska, at Imperial College London, UK, who reviewed the fast-charging batteries in 2019, was more cautious about the speed of their rollout. "I think technologies [like StoreDot's] could start entering the market in the next five years or so. However, since they will be more difficult and expensive to manufacture, we're likely to initially only see them in niche markets that are highly performance-driven and not as price-sensitive as electric vehicles," she said.

This article was amended on 4 February 2021. Echion uses niobium oxide microparticles, not niobium oxide nanoparticles as an earlier version said.

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Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced

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Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time, marking a significant step towards electric cars becoming as fast to charge as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles. Electric vehicles are a vital part of action to tackle the climate crisis but running out of charge during a journey is a worry for drivers.

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Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees

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Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees

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2019 | CNBC

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Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees

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Here's Where the Juice That Powers Batteries Comes From

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Here's Where the Juice That Powers Batteries Comes From

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Bloomberg | 2017

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The Future Of Energy Storage Beyond Lithium Ion