# Ant Forest (Alipay)

> Alipay's gamified green-points program that has funded hundreds of millions of trees in China's drylands

Source: https://treerm.org/org/ant-forest · Updated 2026-11-08 · Data license: CC BY 4.0 (https://treerm.org/about#license)

## Facts

- Type: Company
- Scope: National
- Headquarters: Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
- Founded: 2016
- Website: https://www.antgroup.com/en
- Countries where they plant: China
- Activity types: Afforestation (primary), Education & advocacy, Carbon offset planting
- Trees on record: 700,000,000 (larger of latest cumulative figure and sum of annual figures; trees planted or distributed)

## About

Ant Forest is a program inside Ant Group's Alipay app, launched in August 2016. Users earn 'green energy' points for low-carbon actions such as walking, cycling or paying bills online, grow a virtual tree, and Ant Group then pays partner foundations (the China Green Foundation, the SEE Foundation and others) to plant a real tree, mostly drought-tolerant species such as saxaul in Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and other arid provinces linked to China's Three-North Shelterbelt Program. It won the UN Champions of the Earth award in 2019. It is a corporate program, not a charity: the planting is funded from Ant Group's own money and carried out by its NGO partners.

## Programs

- **Ant Forest tree planting** — Afforestation (2016–present): Users' green-energy points are converted into real trees that Ant Group pays partner foundations to plant in China's arid north and west, about 90 percent of them in Three-North Shelterbelt Program areas.
- **Ant Forest projects with the China Green Foundation** — Afforestation (2017–present): The China Green Foundation is Ant Forest's largest planting partner, running roughly 440 Ant Forest-funded projects across seven provincial-level regions since 2017.

## Metrics

> Note: Ant Forest counts trees that Alipay users 'grow' with green-energy points and that Ant Group then pays partner foundations to plant; Ant does not plant trees itself. Its running total moved from 600 million (April 2025, Yicai) to 619 million (as of August 2025, per China Daily and Ant's October 2025 release) to 700 million (as of August 2026, Ant Group release). The 386 million trees and 200,000 hectares credited to the China Green Foundation partnership are a subset of those totals and are also claimed by the China Green Foundation. User counts are inconsistent between releases (750 million in 2025, 700 million in 2026). No independent audit of the tree counts has been published.

| Metric | Year | Value | Cumulative | Program | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---:|---|---|---|---|
| Trees planted | 2025 | 619,000,000 | yes (to date) | organization-wide | Self-reported | [source](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202606/22/WS6a388c2aa310986e2b46110a.html) China Daily, 22 Jun 2026, citing a Nature commentary: Ant Forest 'has funded more than 619 million drought-resistant trees and shrubs' (Ant's own Oct 2025 release gave the same 619 million as of Aug 2025) |
| Trees planted | 2026 | 700,000,000 | yes (to date) | organization-wide | Self-reported | [source](https://www.businesswirechina.com/en/news/63825.html) Ant Group release of 28 Aug 2026 (Business Wire China): more than 700 million users 'have helped support the planting of over 700 million trees' since 2016; RMB 5.1 billion invested over ten years |
| Hectares restored | 2026 | 200,000 | yes (to date) | Ant Forest projects with the China Green Foundation | Self-reported | [source](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202606/22/WS6a388c2aa310986e2b46110a.html) China Daily, 22 Jun 2026: 'more than 200,000 hectares of desertified land' treated through the CGF-Ant Forest projects, about 90 percent in Three-North Shelterbelt areas |
| Trees planted | 2026 | 386,000,000 | yes (to date) | Ant Forest projects with the China Green Foundation | Self-reported | [source](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202606/22/WS6a388c2aa310986e2b46110a.html) China Daily, 22 Jun 2026, quoting CGF secretary general Zhang Quanzhou: 386 million trees planted since 2017 across about 440 Ant Forest projects in seven provincial-level regions |

Confidence: self-reported is the organization's own published figure; independently verified means a third party confirmed it; estimated means TreeRM derived it and the note says how.

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