Mastercard and Ant Group tie up to promote green action among a billion people
Mastercard, Ant Group, and BBVA are some of the financial and technological firms, among others, that have tied up to promote a very large green initiative to promote environment-friendly activities.
There has been a lot of demand for accountability towards the environment from various industries and also from the government and regulators in each and every industry. The financial services industry also cannot be immune to these changes that are happening around the world as the awareness and the need to protect the environment has grown. Various companies have been focussing their effort on green initiatives and also have been trying their best to become carbon neutral in due course of time.
In fact, becoming carbon neutral is likely to be a key criterion for evaluating companies in the future and it is likely that the government and the people are likely to support those companies with zero carbon footprint than others as the air around us becomes very dirty and impure.
As part of this initiative, thats was launched by the Green Digital Finance Alliance, the coalition of companies has set itself a target of one billion digital green champions by the year 2025. Each company will undertake several initiatives in this regard with Mastercard looking to integrate all its card partners into a reforestation initiative while Ant Group is looking towards individuals to reduce their carbon footprint, by taking the bus to work instead of car and similar such activities.
Kristina Kloberdanz, chief sustainability officer, Mastercard, says the coalition “reinforces our commitment to building an inclusive and sustainable digital economy – where people and the planet can thrive – as we bring innovations and initiatives to market that help people understand the environmental impact of their behaviour”.
The environmental impact of the various actions performed by the financial services industry including trading, crypto mining, usage of huge servers, etc has become the focus in recent times and people and the authorities have started demanding accountability from the industry. This is the reason why we are seeing the industry respond to the critics with fast and quick plans to ensure that the industry adopts environmentally sustainable practices which will help it to move towards zero carbon footprint in the long run.
