Misleading: Viral WEF clip does not show proposal to ‘monetize’ air or breathing

25 June 2026

A guest speaker’s remarks, not WEF executive’s, on natural capital accounting were distorted in the viral post with a made-up quote.

On June 9, a video clip of a speech at the World Economic Forum was shared on X with a claim that the speaker proposed to “monetize breathing” and charge people for air and indicated that our lungs would be “owned” by unspecified corporations.

The post identifies the speaker as a “WEF executive,” implying her comments reflect an official policy directive from the organization.

The video was posted by Vivek Sen, a crypto influencer and an author at Bitcoin Magazine. The caption attributes the following quote to the speaker:

“Water, soil, and oxygen should not be infinitely accessible. They’re assets that should be included in our global economic balance sheets.”

However, that exact wording does not appear in the remarks she delivered at the forum.

Within a week, the post gained over 18,000 likes, 12,000 reposts, and 3,500 replies. Similar claims appeared on Facebook and Instagram.

The claim is not new. The earliest example of the same narrative in Annie Lab’s review dates back to an article published on June 27, 2024, in The Sociable, a technology news publication.

All these posts take the statement out of context and falsely assert that the WEF plans to monetize breathing and classify air, water, and soil as assets in a way that would restrict basic access.

Also, our investigation found that the speaker is not a WEF executive but a sustainability expert invited as a guest panelist. Her comments focused on natural capital accounting as a tool to protect the environment, and by extension the economy, rather than on imposing charges on individual users.

Origins of the clip

The viral post uses a segment from the session “Connecting Climate, Nature and Energy: Understanding Nature’s Ledger” at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions, held in late June 2024 in Dalian, China.

The event backdrop visible in the video matches the stage set for the Dalian meeting in 2024

Annie Lab identified the speaker as Lindsay Hooper by cross-referencing several resources: the meeting speaker list (archived here), the moderator’s introduction in the official replay, the nameplate displayed in the live-streamed footage that reads “Hooper,” and her official staff profile (archived here) on the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) website.

Hooper is the chief executive officer of the CISL, and she joined the session to discuss how corporate competitiveness can be aligned with environmental sustainability, particularly through better measurement of how businesses depend on and affect nature.

The speaker’s nameplate (highlighted in yellow) and appearance in the viral video (left) are consistent with her official WEF interview graphics (center) and her CISL profile (right)

Hooper responded to Annie Lab through CISL’s head of media via email, saying that the viral narrative misrepresents her remarks. Her comments were about the need for businesses and financial institutions “to recognise the value of nature within economic systems, so that impacts and dependencies are properly accounted for.”

“This is about protecting and restoring essential natural systems—it is not restricting access to basic necessities such as air, water or soil, which must remain universally accessible,” she said in the email.

The viral clip appears to be drawn from a portion of the 2024 session between 8:14 and 11:09 in the official recording.

The specific quote ascribed to her in the X post — that water, soil, and oxygen “should not be infinitely accessible” — does not appear in the full session transcript.

Instead, Hooper argued that nature is a “fundamental building block” of the economy, and that treating key natural resources as if they are costless and inexhaustible encourages overuse and undermines long-term prosperity.

Quote taken out of context

During the panel, Hooper also stressed that the world “can’t do business on a dead planet.”

“If we’re going to protect natural systems, one of the solutions is to bring nature onto the balance sheet,” she said.

She went on to say governments, companies, and financial institutions should incorporate nature-related assets and risks into their traditional economic and financial reporting frameworks, so that “capital is directed to activity that’s good for nature and away from business that’s fundamentally damaging the planet.”

While Hooper’s full remarks span five minutes and five seconds, the viral post isolates only the first two minutes and 55 seconds, stripping away the second half of her speech.

Natural Capital Accounting

The concept Hooper promotes in the forum is called natural capital accounting, an increasingly common approach in government and business.

According to the European Commission, natural capital accounting measures how the quantity and condition of ecosystems change over time and systematically incorporates the benefits and economic value of the services they provide into standard accounting and reporting systems, such as the United Nations’ System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA).

In 2024, the Commission adopted new rules and introduced new account modules, including ecosystem accounts and forest accounts, to compile more detailed data from European Union member states. The UN says more than 30 countries currently produce ecosystem accounts, and many others are piloting natural capital accounting to inform policy, investment and biodiversity targets worldwide.

According to its website, CISL works with businesses and financial institutions on natural capital accounting and regularly publishes reports and tools on net‑zero corporate roadmaps, sustainable finance, and climate risk and insurability.

Transcript of Lindsay Hooper’s remark, eight minutes into the event

When we talk about capital, we tend to think only about financial capital, about cash, financial assets, but we know that’s not the only value on which our economies depend. We know that every aspect of every part of the economy is fundamentally dependent on nature, as you highlighted, the air that we breathe, the water we drink, the soil, the oceans that we need for the food that we need to consume, the minerals that we need as inputs to technology and to infrastructure — and without these forms of value, these forms of natural capital, we won’t have economies. They are the fundamental building blocks of our economies. But the ways, as you said, the ways in which we have grown our economies, our models of economic development have been incredibly successful for global prosperity, but the unintended consequences of current models of growth are simply not sustainable on a finite planet. The amount of resource that we are drawing in to our economies — Earth’s resources — and the amount of pollution and waste that we’re pumping out, whether that’s through greenhouse gas emissions, whether that’s sewage into our water, whether it’s plastics into the ocean, is beyond the earth’s carrying capacity, and we know that that’s leading, as you said, to very significant direct impacts for society, but very significant financial costs for the economy.

We can look at that as you have and calculate that at a macro level, but the way that that’s showing up as we’re breaching these boundaries and breaching these limits and undermining nature is showing up in very practical ways that are showing up for financial risk for institutions. Lack of water is leading to disruption of operations of supply chains where water is needed as an essential input for manufacturing or power production; The degradation of soil is leading to reduced agricultural yields; The decline of pollinator species is also having an impact on agriculture, so that’s leading to direct financial risks for organizations, for businesses, and ultimately for investors. And you said ultimately, the reason for this is, at the moment, the way that decisions are made on an everyday level within businesses and financial institutions, is because we’re looking only at financial data, financial metrics that are not factoring in nature.

Nature is treated within the economy as though it’s unlimited, and predominantly as though it’s free, and the risks and harms are simply not costed in financial terms. We can cost them at a macro level, they’re not costed into day-to-day decision making, and the result is, as a consequence, we’ve put all of our economies at fundamental risk. We can’t do business on a dead planet. If we’re going to protect natural systems, one of the solutions is to bring nature onto the balance sheet, to bring nature into the ways that decisions are made within business, to allocate a value to it and to bring it into accounting and financial mechanisms. You also asked about how that will lead to better decision-making. I think it’s just good business — it’s just about good long-term value creation. And importantly, it’s about resilience for the long term. It’s about moving from a landscape of growing risk to more resilient organizations, and businesses, investors, by better mapping, assessing, integrating that understanding of their dependencies and associated risks, the impacts and associated risks, can make better decision making to protect themselves, position themselves for the future.

But I think it’s important to note that simply bringing it into accounting and having better understanding won’t automatically lead to better decision making. Business decision-making is not affected only by their own assessment of risk, it’s also by the regulatory landscape that they’re in, and by the market signals. Many of the leading businesses that we work with are between a rock and a hard place. They’ve got direct risks from nature affecting them. They know that they need to shift. They’ve got increasing pressure to disclose some of those risks. Their stakeholders, their staff, their customers would love them to be shifting, and a lot of them know what it would take, but the challenge is, at the moment, it’s predominantly voluntary.

If they take action and bear the costs of transition that their competitors aren’t, they risk being punished in the markets for absorbing those costs, so they need markets to be tilted, so they’re no longer having to take a trade-off between short-term commerciality and protecting themselves against long-term nature risks. There’s a need for action by government and by financial markets, alongside business, so that capital is directed to activity that’s good for nature, and away from business that’s fundamentally damaging the planet.