The river in the sky, spawned by trees.
The Amazon rainforest doesn’t simply receive rain. It’s the world’s water pump - creating and recycling rain on an extraordinary scale.
Every day, billions of trees release vast volumes of moisture into the air, creating invisible rivers known as Flying Rivers.
How the rainforest creates rain.
Trees draw water from the soil and release it through their leaves in a process called transpiration. That moisture rises into the atmosphere, gathers into vast
This self-sustaining cycle generates the rainfall that keeps the forest alive.
Why they matter.
Flying Rivers do far more than sustain the rainforest. They are natural infrastructure at continental scale, carrying moisture thousands of kilometres across the Americas and helping generate 20% of global rainfall.
Water Security
Flying Rivers regulate rainfall and replenish rivers and reservoirs, supplying water to more than one billion people across the Americas.
One Interconnected World
Water generated by the Amazon moves beyond South America, interacting with atmospheric systems that influence rainfall and weather patterns worldwide.
Food, Energy & Economic Security
Flying Rivers sustain the rainfall that feeds crops, generates hydroelectricity, and underpins industries and livelihoods across countries and continents.
What happens to the Amazon’s water does not stay in the Amazon.
Why Flying Rivers are disappearing.
Flying Rivers depend upon vast, dense and connected rainforest. As the forest is destroyed and degraded, fewer trees release moisture, weakening the Flying Rivers and reducing the rain they generate.
Across the southern Amazon, annual rainfall has declined by 8–11% over recent decades, with deforestation attributed to most of it.
The Amazon has lost 17% of its forest. Scientists warn that beyond 25%, it could reach a tipping point towards ecosystem collapse.
Clear the forest, and we don't just lose trees and carbon. We lose the water cycle that keeps the Amazon alive and the rainfall it sends far beyond it.
The Last Great Flying Rivers.
Across the Northern Amazon, 67% of the rainforest remains conserved through decades of Indigenous governance and frontline conservation - one of the world’s greatest unheralded conservation achievements.
It is here that the Amazon’s Last Great Flying River survives - the very last of its kind.
However, the work of securing the Last Great Flying River is far from complete: the majority already conserved must be sustained and consolidated, while the remaining third still needs protection.