Since 2016, China has turned phone users' daily purchases into 122 million real trees; the digital forest now covers 112,000 hectares of dryland

You don't get in the car and walk to the coffee shop instead. You pay a bill online instead of mailing a check. Small stuff, right? According to the United Nations Environment Program, a Chinese initiative called Ant Forest has translated exactly these sorts of small, everyday decisions of half a billion people into millions of real trees planted across some of the country’s driest land.

In 2019, the UN gave it its highest environmental award, the Champions of the Earth award, in the “Inspiration and Action” category. This story might hit different for US millennials who scroll through 10 apps before breakfast. It shows what happens when climate action moves from being a chore to being a game.

How the app actually works
Ant Forest was developed by Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of Alibaba now known as Ant Group, as a feature within its mobile payment app Alipay, in partnership with the United Nations Environment Program. Every time a user takes a low-carbon action, such as using public transit, walking instead of driving, or paying their bills online, they earn points called “green energy.” These points build up into a virtual tree on the user's phone screen. When enough points are accumulated, Alipay and its nonprofit partners plant a real tree in a dry area. Users can watch their tree grow using satellite images, and some choose to protect patches of conservation land through the same platform.

The numbers behind the forest
Since the launch of Ant Forest in August 2016, it and its NGO partners have planted around 122 million trees in some of China’s driest areas such as Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Shanxi, according to the United Nations Environment Program. Today those trees cover some 112,000 hectares, an area larger than Chicago. That scale has turned Ant Forest into China’s largest private-sector tree-planting initiative.

Why this matters for a generation raised on apps
Millennials and Gen Z grew up hearing climate change is a huge, near-impossible problem. Ant Forest breaks this problem down into manageable steps, in the same way a fitness app breaks a marathon down into daily step goals. The peer-reviewed study, ‘Intelligence technologies and low-carbon consumption behavior: evidence from Chinese app “Ant Forest,’ published in Frontiers in Environmental Science, looked at 399 Ant Forest users and found that features like this can actually change people’s daily habits towards lower-carbon choices, especially when a person’s attitude and daily context are aligned.

And it’s not just a marketing thing either. According to a peer-reviewed study published on PMC, titled ‘Influence of incentive mechanism and fit degree on user’s environmental behavior—Taking Alipay “Ant Forest” in China as an example,’ researchers surveyed 500 Ant Forest users and found that economic, value-based, and social incentives affected participation in the platform’s environmental activities. Simply put, people go green when they see a clear reward and a community around it.

The bigger picture: from your phone to the desert
According to the UNFCCC, the United Nations body that runs global climate talks, Ant Forest turns everyday activities, such as paying bills online or buying tickets digitally, into measurable green energy points, and early results show strong potential for scaling this kind of digital climate action to other regions.

This could be a good example for young Americans who care about sustainability but feel daunted by the scale of the climate crisis. You don’t need a solar farm or an electric car to move the needle. You need a habit loop, a little friendly competition, and a reason to keep going. And Ant Forest also allows friends to “steal” green energy from each other, making it more of a fun social game than a guilt trip.

Could something like this work in the US?
The US doesn’t have an app just like Ant Forest yet, but the concept behind it, of using everyday spending and daily habits to fund actual environmental projects, is catching on. A few US fintech apps are already measuring the carbon footprint of an individual’s spending. The next step for Ant Forest is to make that data something you can watch grow, tree by tree, literally.

None of this means one app can solve climate change alone. Ant Forest’s 122 million trees are impressive, but they’re just one piece of a much bigger puzzle involving policy change, corporate accountability and international cooperation. But, as the sources above say, it’s proof that the everyday choices we make already on our phones every single day can add up to something real. Sometimes the biggest environmental gains begin with the smallest taps on a screen.