WCC news: WCC champions water as a human right on Earth Day 2026

On 20 April, two days before UN Mother Earth Day, faith leaders and practitioners from across the world gathered for the latest session of the "Healing the Earth 2026" interfaith webinar series, co-organized by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and United Religions Initiative Europe.  Women gather at a community water tap in Salang, a village in the Dhading District of Nepal where Dan Church Aid, a member of the ACT Alliance, has provided a variety of support to local villagers in the wake of a devastating 2015 earthquake. The village's water system was destroyed by the quake, forcing women to walk two hours or more to a nearby river to fetch water. Working with a local organization, the Forum for Awareness and Youth Activity, the ACT Alliance rebuilt the village's water system. Photo: Paul Jeffrey/Life on Earth Pictures 22 April 2026 Among the presenters was Dinesh Suna, WCC programme executive for Land, Water, and Food and coordinator of the WCC Ecumenical Water Network. His message was direct: water is not a commodity. It is a gift of God, a public good, and a fundamental human right, and faith communities can no longer afford to treat it as anything less. The webinar brought participants from across the world to confront a water justice crisis that is, Suna argued, as much about rights as it is about supply. The numbers bear this out: humanity is consuming the equivalent of 1.8 Earths each year, according to the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts 2025 Edition, while over 1.9 billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water and more than 3.4 billion lack adequate sanitation, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. None of this, Suna made clear, is simply a problem of scarcity. It is a problem of injustice. "We can no longer work in silos," he told participants, pointing to three United Nations summits in 2026 on climate change, biodiversity, and land and desertification. Emerging from the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, each targets a different dimension of the planetary crisis. Water runs through all three. "We only have one earth. Let's protect it." The Ecumenical Water Network, established in 2006 by a mandate of the WCC 9th Assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has built its work on a single theological conviction: water is a gift of God, a public good, and a fundamental human right. That conviction drives the network's opposition to water privatization, its annual Seven Weeks for Water Lenten campaign, and its advocacy for universal access to safe water by 2030. Suna also highlighted the WCC's Blue Community commitment, a pledge to champion publicly financed, accountable water systems, as a model for faith institutions ready to take that conviction off the page. Both commitments sit within the WCC's Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action (2025–2034), which designates 2026 as its Climate and Biodiversity thematic year. Suna left participants with a call for action: "Mother Earth does not belong to us; we belong to her. On this day, let us recommit ourselves to healing, restoration, and justice. Let our faith translate into action, not next year, not tomorrow, but today." The "Healing the Earth 2026" series, coordinated by URI Europe with the Asha Centre, Middlesex University London, TiA, Unity in Diversity, DME, and URI UK, gathers every third Monday at 17:00 CET via Zoom.  Register for future webinars here   WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP)  Earth Overshoot Day Ecumenical Water Network Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action Honoring Mother Earth - URI Earth Healing Interfaith Webinar See more

The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 356 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 580 million Christians in over 120 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay from the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa. Media contact: +41 79 507 6363; www.oikoumene.org/press Our visiting address is: World Council of Churches Chemin du Pommier 42 Kyoto Building Le Grand-Saconnex CH-1218 Switzerland