# Four Hundred Thousand Footsteps: How Much Carbon Do They Offset? > The 2026 Baishatun Mazu Pilgrimage introduced a GPS carbon footprint tracking system for the first time, combining the SSBTi science-based carbon reduction framework with a nine-tier gamified pilgrim ranking system. The project attempts to document the low-carbon significance of 400,000 pilgrims' walking behavior in a modern, data-driven way. Emission factor: 0.21 kg CO₂/km; estimated avoided emissions: approximately 6,300 tonnes of CO₂. A cross-disciplinary experiment, still unfolding. - Author: Paul Kuo（郭曜郎） - Date: 2026-04-01 - Pillar: Recycle & Reuse - Tags: Carbon Footprint, Baishatun Mazu, ESG, GPS Tracking, Sustainable Action, Cloudflare Workers, Gamification Design - Canonical: https://paulkuo.tw/en/articles/formosa-esg-2026-low-carbon-pilgrimage/ - Language: English - Translation: AI-translated from the zh-Hant (Traditional Chinese) original - Original (zh-Hant): https://paulkuo.tw/articles/formosa-esg-2026-low-carbon-pilgrimage.md - Site index for LLMs: https://paulkuo.tw/llms.txt - Idea file (goal, constraints, tradeoffs, acceptance criteria; written in zh-Hant; feed it to your agent to rebuild this project): https://paulkuo.tw/articles/formosa-esg-2026-low-carbon-pilgrimage.idea.md --- > **TL;DR** The 2026 Baishatun Mazu Pilgrimage introduced a GPS carbon footprint tracking system for the first time, built from zero in four weeks through a partnership with SSBTi. Emission factor: 0.21 kg CO₂/km; estimated avoided emissions: approximately 6,300 tonnes of CO₂ (roughly equivalent to 16 Da'an Forest Parks absorbing carbon for a year). Paired with a nine-tier "immortal cultivation" gamified ranking system, the project tries to find a modern vocabulary for the behavioral values that were always present in religious practice.
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On a weekend afternoon in early February, a friend invited me to where their group regularly meets. They shared their vision: building a platform for sustainable goodness, rooted in civic community. The timeline was tight. They wanted something ready for the [Baishatun Mazu Pilgrimage](https://mazu.today/projects/formosa-esg-2026/) in April, and they were asking if I could help. I...... In 2025, Huanqiu Jingdi, the Tianhou Lions Club, and SSBTi had already launched the "ESG Goodness Footprint" initiative during the Baishatun pilgrimage, collecting pilgrims' low-carbon action records through Google Forms and LINE groups, and connecting thirty-six companies to participate. The concept was proven. But data collection was manual, carbon figures were self-reported, and scaling the data would hit a wall. Registration for 2026 opened and, within days, the count had blown past the final tally from the previous year. The temple estimated it would break 400,000. Nobody was surprised. The broader environment is turbulent, and this is an election year. Byung-Chul Han writes in [*The Disappearance of Rituals*](https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010891045): "Labor in the secular sphere isolates and atomizes, while festivals bring people together as one. The cyclical nature of festivals stems from the fact that people periodically feel the need to gather, because collectivity is our nature." What is genuinely moving is the whole sequence: the walking, the waiting, the departure ceremony, the fire ritual, the return. It turns [faith into an order the body can actually experience](/en/articles/faith-collapse-rebuild/). The kilometers walked are only the surface. The entire ritual draws people into a world with symbolic depth. My thought: if a system could more smoothly record how far each person walked and calculate their carbon reduction, last year's Goodness Footprint concept could graduate from a survey into a real data infrastructure. Watching Claude evolve and gain new capabilities nearly every week, I decided: let's build it and see how far this system can go. ## Baishatun Mazu Pilgrimage: A Growth Curve from 50,000 to 400,000 The Baishatun Mazu Pilgrimage has a history of more than two hundred years. Each spring, pilgrims set out from Baishatun Gongtian Temple in Miaoli and walk to Beigang Chaotian Temple in Yunlin, roughly 400 kilometers round-trip, over eight to nine days. Its most distinctive feature is that the route is never fixed in advance: the palanquin bearers follow Mazu's guidance, and every year is an unknown journey. The growth curve is striking. Registration stood at 54,000 in 2020, crossed 110,000 in 2023, reached nearly 180,000 in 2024, then doubled to 329,000 in 2025. By late March 2026, registrations had already exceeded 370,000, with projections pointing past 400,000. That is more than sevenfold growth in six years. Past coverage mostly focused on the numbers, the routes, and the emotional stories of the pink "supercar" (the palanquin). Starting last year, someone asked the question from a different angle: when this many people choose to walk rather than drive, how much carbon do they actually avoid emitting? There are many dimensions worth exploring here. Taiwan's ESG wave has extended from listed-company annual reports into [supply chains](/en/articles/jd-ai-supply-chain-revolution/) and has quietly seeped into everyday conversation. [Every quantifiable carbon-reduction figure carries real weight](/en/articles/civilization-metric-system-over-goal/), and ordinary people no longer treat it as an obscure technical term. Last year's Goodness Footprint project proved the concept worked, but moving data from concept to something trackable and recorded requires more than a survey. It requires a system. ## How Much Carbon Can a Walking Pilgrimage Offset? The Calculation Logic The carbon footprint calculation is not complicated. The [Ministry of Environment's emission factor database](https://ghgregistry.moenv.gov.tw/) tells us that a passenger car emits roughly 0.21 kilograms of CO₂ per kilometer. If a pilgrim chooses to walk rather than drive, each kilometer avoids that 0.21 kg of emissions. Running the numbers: assume 300,000 people each walk an average of 100 kilometers (a conservative estimate, since many participants cover only part of the route). Under those assumptions, the substitution effect corresponds to roughly 6,300 tonnes of avoided CO₂. By common conversion estimates, that is approximately equivalent to the annual carbon absorption of [sixteen Da'an Forest Parks](https://www.forest.gov.tw/). > **📊 Key Figures** > - **Emission factor**: 0.21 kg CO₂ per kilometer (Ministry of Environment published value) > - **Estimated total avoided emissions**: approximately 6,300 tonnes CO₂ > - **Equivalent to**: 16 Da'an Forest Parks' annual carbon absorption But these are figures on paper. The real question is: how does each person know how far they walked and how much they contributed? How do you connect "doing good" with "reducing carbon" so that these acts become visible? That is the reason for using AI to upgrade the system this year. ## Building a Ten-Thousand-User Carbon Footprint Tracker in Four Weeks March 23rd. Twenty days until the April 12th departure. I partnered with the [SSBTi (Science-Based Target initiative for 1.5°C)](https://www.ssbti.org): they provided the methodology framework for science-based carbon reduction and the association's endorsement; I handled technical development and system deployment. [SSBTi](https://www.ssbti.org) is a nonprofit civic association formally registered under the Ministry of the Interior in 2022, and Taiwan's member of the international Science-Based Targets for supply chain decarbonization initiative. They had already co-organized the Goodness Footprint project last year. This year's collaboration was more focused: they provided the science-based carbon reduction methodology, and I was responsible for converting the manual process into a more automated interface, integrating the website with LINE OA. The technical architecture uses Astro for the frontend, with Cloudflare Workers + D1 + KV on the backend, everything running on edge computing. The reason for this architecture was practical: the pilgrimage happens while people are moving, mobile signals are unreliable, and the system needs extremely low latency and high availability. Cloudflare's global edge nodes solve exactly that problem. Also, asking everyone to install another app was never realistic. What got built in four weeks looks almost unreal when laid out: Day one: validate technical feasibility, capture GPS coordinates from a phone and confirm the precision is sufficient. Day two: build the backend skeleton, GPS check-in API, carbon calculation formula, LINE Bot integration, D1 database schema, Worker deployment. Day three: complete the frontend UX overhaul, thirteen-question card-based survey interface, linear progress bar, nine-tier pilgrim ranking system. Day four: launch the Dashboard and security layer, server-side map clustering, rate limiting, activity on/off controls. Days five and six: four rounds of load testing, peaking at 5,000 simultaneous virtual users, with a 99.99% success rate. Finishing under that kind of time pressure was only possible because Claude did a lot of the heavy lifting. From architecture design to code generation to test scripts, Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code were tireless engineering partners. My role was closer to project decision-maker and quality control: every "why this approach" and "why not that one" was my call, but the [execution speed was carried by the AI](/en/articles/ai-capability-gap-2026/) (and the tokens, which cost real money). ## From Qi Refinement to Ascension: The Nine-Tier Gamified Pilgrim Ranking System The detail I cared most about in the system design was the nine-tier pilgrim ranking. The concept was inspired by [*A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality*](https://youtu.be/oVrBrKtC9cQ?si=bHCqxl7pmwlXfuZz). Starting at "Qi Refinement," pilgrims advance through tiers as they accumulate mileage and check-ins: Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul, all the way to Ascension. Each tier has its own illustrated character, replacing the emoji I had originally planned to use. This was not a gimmick. The Baishatun Pilgrimage is itself a metaphor for cultivation: you walk every step on your own feet, and along the way you pass through exhaustion, perseverance, wonder, and moments of clarity. The ranking system gives concrete shape to that inner journey. ![Nine-tier pilgrim ranking character illustrations: from Qi Refinement to Ascension](/images/formosa-esg-pilgrim-ranks.png) The idea echoes the concept of [incarnation](/en/articles/incarnation-ai-embodiment/): abstract belief only becomes meaningful when it enters concrete bodily experience. The Christian tradition's Stations of the Cross invites contemplation of one's relationship with God at each moment of Christ's suffering, a meditation on what it means to be fully human. That resonated with what I was trying to do here. Carbon footprint data is abstract, but when you open your phone and see that you have risen from Qi Refinement to Core Formation, that you have logged fifty kilometers and avoided 10.5 kilograms of carbon emissions, the number stops being just a number. It becomes your vow. The share page was also deliberately designed: full-width map, QR code, live statistics. A pilgrim resting on the road pulls out their phone, scans the code, and sees exactly where they are, what tier they have reached, and how much carbon they have reduced. Then they share it. Every share is a small act of spreading sustainability awareness. ## When ESG Is No Longer Just a Corporate Report: A Sustainable Field for 400,000 People Building this system, I kept noticing how the most important concepts are the ones most likely to collapse into buzzwords. The difficulty with ESG in Taiwan is not a shortage of methodology. It is a shortage of scenes. Companies conduct carbon inventories, write sustainability reports, and set reduction targets, all of which are the right things to do, but still feel distant to most people. For most, ESG reads as homework for listed companies. What we hope is that the Baishatun Pilgrimage can shift that perception. When you embed carbon footprint tracking in an event with 400,000 participants, sustainability can become something as concrete and personal as: "I walked fifteen kilometers today, corresponding to roughly 3.15 kilograms of avoided carbon emissions." Not just a line in a report. Faith provides the motivation, technology provides the measurement, and the combination is a new kind of experiment. The integration itself is already an innovation. For companies, this kind of methodology-estimated data also offers a new angle: a supplement to sustainability engagement and social impact narratives, rather than yet another number in an annual report. [SSBTi](https://www.ssbti.org) plays exactly that role in this project: providing a methodological reference and framework so that data moves from an engineer's estimates toward behavioral indicators with a sound basis and room to keep improving. ## The Voice of 400,000 Pairs of Feet On April 12th, the square in front of Baishatun Gongtian Temple will be packed with pilgrims waiting to set out. The moment the firecrackers sound, they will start walking. Some will complete all eight days, some will walk a single day and head home, some will join midway and leave midway. Every person's path is different, but every step will be recorded. I do not know what the final data will look like: the total distance, the total carbon reduction, which stretch of road sees the most check-ins. But I know one thing: [connecting the power of faith with a sustainability framework](/en/articles/compass-meets-algorithm-authority-in-human-ai-era/) is a meaningful act of creation. This time, what we did was attempt to connect and integrate. To use technology to translate footsteps that were always there, always invisible, into a language contemporary society can read. This time, 400,000 pairs of feet left real numbers behind. Carbon reduction has a name. Faith has a shape that can be seen. Of course, these figures still rest on specific assumptions, for example, whether walking actually substituted for what would have been a car journey, and there is much that could be refined further. But that is precisely what makes the attempt worthwhile: it gives a collective action that was previously impossible to quantify a chance to be understood and discussed. Integration takes many hands: supplies, technical skills, the help of many volunteers, tens of thousands of lines of code written over six days, or just a check-in button on your phone. If technology has a higher purpose, it is this: to let rituals leave behind, in this era, a shape that can be seen. [Learn more: 2026 Baishatun Mazu Pilgrimage. Formosa ESG Low-Carbon Goodness Tracking System](https://mazu.today/projects/formosa-esg-2026/)