Consumer Behavior Change

Digital Payment Giants Join Forces to Nudge 1B Users into Climate Action

Mastercard, BBVA and Ant Group are among 12 global firms aiming to steer consumers toward behaviors that help support climate action and restore biodiversity around the world.

Published 3 years ago | About a 3 minute read

Image: Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels

Some of the world’s leading digital payment platforms, financial institutions, and consumer goods and services companies have partnered on an initiative that aims to channel the power of conscious consumer behaviors to enhance biodiversity and climate efforts.

The Every Action Counts (EAC) coalition — launched today by the Green Digital Finance Alliance (GDFA), funded by the Finance for Biodiversity (F4B) initiative of the MAVA Foundation — brings together a global network of digital, financial, e-commerce, and consumer goods and services companies with experts in sustainability, and nature and biodiversity conservation. The new network will share best practices in encouraging individuals to take positive actions in daily life to create benefits for nature and biodiversity the world over. With their collective global reach, each coalition member has committed to pursue locally relevant approaches to driving sustainable consumer behaviors by advancing people-centric, tech-enabled and innovation-oriented engagement models.

The coalition aims to scale sustainable behaviors as a norm that is encouraged, recognized and rewarded, leveraging technology and innovation models.

Examples of this in practice include:

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● Philippines-based app GCash forest, which rewards users who reduce their carbon footprint by planting trees in partnership with groups such as WWF.

● Mastercard is uniting its global network of businesses and consumers in climate action through the Priceless Planet Coalition reforestation initiative. Through partnerships with innovators such as Doconomy — with which they’ve co-created the DO card and more recently, the Mastercard Carbon Calculator — to create digital products that provide users insights about the carbon impact of purchases and enable people to easily contribute to preserving the environment.

● Ant Forest, an initiative on the Alipay platform that encourages users to adopt low-carbon activities in daily life — such as going to work by bus instead of by car, and paying utility bills online instead of via mail. The initiative has enabled the planting of over 220 million trees in less than five years.

The coalition aims to promote knowledge-sharing to inspire innovative tech solutions around the world, helping each payment platform and consumer goods company to focus on the sustainable behaviors most relevant to their audience.

Marianne Haahr, Executive Director of Green Digital Finance Alliance and spokesperson for the EAC coalition, said: “This new coalition wants to creatively leverage technology and partnerships to enhance awareness and catalyze ‘green’ action for 1 billion people by 2025. We want to encourage consumer behavior that can become a driver of nature conservation and regeneration.

“We see a future where economic growth can coexist with, and even support, nature conservation and climate action — which is why we are bringing together partners who can help champion this vision for our global economy.”

The founding members of the EAC Coalition are:

Ant Group/Alipay (China),
BBVA (Spain),
BigPay (Malaysia),
DANA (Indonesia),
FNZ (UK),
GCash (Philippines),
Lazada Group (Singapore),
Mastercard (US),
MTN (South Africa),
Paytm (India),
SANLAM (South Africa), and
Telenor Microfinance Bank/Easypay (Pakistan).

Experts working with the coalition include Siegmar Otto, a leading researcher on sustainable consumer behavior and human-computer interaction; Professor Richard Wood of the Industrial Ecology Programme at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology); and environmental engineer Francesca Verones, also at NTNU.

“A deep shift in behavioral change must happen and we have no doubt that it will happen,” says Antoni Ballabriga, Global Head of Responsible Business at BBVA*.* “This exciting moment offers an opportunity to build solutions that help citizens translate values into behaviors at a massive scale and shape new green behavioral norms. The companies that will take a proactive role in this moment of the journey will have a huge impact and will succeed. We look forward to collaborating in this new effort, focused on environmental integrity and high ambition.”