From a Virtual Seedling to a Real-world Tree in your Name
Updated: Mar 12, 2020
Through Ant Forest, your current everyday low-carbon habits can transform barren desert into green forest.
“I start every day by rustling through my friends’ trees and stealing their energy”
- WangFang. Employee at TA.
“Since I got in the habit, it’s not an alarm clock that gets me up every morning, it’s Ant Forest.”
It’s early. Your body still doesn’t want to move. Definitely can’t get out of bed..
The first thing most of us do in the morning is unlock that phone screen and check SNS - myself included – but recently I’ve found a new wake-up ritual: carbon theft.
Truth be told, at first, when I heard about the Ant Forest applet, I understood it was a not-for-profit eco project launched by Alipay.. something to do with trees.. but it didn’t really register on my radar. But in September 2019, a certain news headline made me realize: I seem to be the only one not paying attention.
The headline was:
“Alipay’s ‘Ant Forest’ project awarded the UN’s highest environmental honor: the ‘Champions of the Earth’ Award.”
It seemed like a good time to check this Ant Forest thing out, and this is how my early morning tree rummaging began.
The concept:
The idea behind Ant Forest is simple: in daily life, whatever we are doing, we always have the choice between more and less eco-friendly options. For example, when going somewhere, you could take the metro or public transport, or ride a sharebike. Alternatively, you could take a one-passenger taxi ride or drive your car.
What Ant Forest does is calculate the carbon you save through your every day actions, and reward you with it, turning your eco-friendly, low-carbon emission choices into ‘Energy’ you can use in-app to grow a virtual tree.
The best part? Save up enough energy, and you the virtual becomes reality – with Alipay as your sponsor, a baby tree will be planted in the desert, in your name!
Join in!
It’s easy, and it gets you up in the morning~
|| Here’s how to play:
1. Open Alipay. Copy and paste “蚂蚁森林” into the search bar. Hit search.
2. Open Ant Forest (see the image).
3. Meet your virtual sapling!
Your total carbon savedis displayed in grams in the top right-hand corner.
The floating energy balls are the carbon saved through your previous eco-friendly actions. Tap to gather them, increase your total and grow your tree.
4. “Borrow” energy from friends
Scroll down to see the ‘Green Heroes’ Leader Board.
All your Alipay friends are here. Does anyone have a little green hand icon at the top right-hand corner of their icon (above their total grams)?
Click in and you can take their unclaimed energy!
5. Give energy to friends
At your friend’s tree, tap on the blue watering canin the bottom right corner of the screen.Choose 1g, 5g, 10g or 18g and tap the green button below to send.
You can send three times every day for any friend– that’s a total of 54g a day! Be generous~
6. See what you can plant!
Back at your sapling, next to your total grams, you’ll see the Plant button. Click in, see the trees you can get, and the carbon goal to make your tree real!
Any tips?
Last year my carbon reached 16,930g – enough to plant my very own Caragana peashrub in the Mongolian desert. Want one too? Here’s my advice:
“The early bird gets the worm”
“The early carbon thief gets the tree!”
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