Fact Check: WEF didn’t order once a week bath to combat climate change, social media post misleading

The World Economic Forum (WEF) ordering the public to bathe only once a week or less to combat climate change! That was the astonishing claim in a recent Twitter post, which was debunked by the PTI Fact Check team.

The WEF, it found, had never made any such statement and the Twitter post, which used a screenshot of a report headlined "WEF Orders Public To Bathe 'Once a Week or Less' To Save the Planet", was misleading. The tweet had many thousand views and hundreds of retweets.

In the first step of its investigation, the Fact Check team went through the article tweeted by the user on December 29 last year. The article was published by a website, News Punch, on the same day. The report did not carry any official statement either by the WEF or any agency official.

The YouTube video embedded in the report was not related to WEF or any other related agency. It was an animation clip detailing the advantages of showering/bathing once a week.

In the next step of its investigation, the team scanned the organisation’s official website and social media handles but couldn’t find any such announcement. Had the WEF made any such announcement, it would have made the headlines across countries.

Water crisis is listed as one of the main reasons for climate change in WEF’s Global Risks Report 2021.

The report, based on the World Economic Forum Global Risks Perception Survey 2020, puts chemical, food, mineral, and water crises at the top of the global scale because of human overexploitation and mismanagement of critical natural resources across the world.

Nowhere in the report has the WEF suggested the frequency of bathing for the public as a step to save water or the climate.

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