Renewable fresh water over continents has input from precipitation and losses to the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration. Global-scale estimates of transpiration from climate models are poorly constrained owing to large uncertainities in somatal conductance and the lack of catchment-scale measurements required for model calibration, resulting in a range of predictions spanning 20 to 65 per cent of total terrestrial evapotranspiration (14,000 to 41,000 km3 per year) (refs 1-5). Here we use the distinct isotope effects of transpiration and evaporation to show that transpiration is by far the largest water flux from Earths continents, representing 80 to 90 per cent of terrestrial evapotranspiration. On the basis of our analysis of a global data set of large lakes and rivers, we conclude that traspiration recycles 62,000 +_ 8,000 km3 of water per year to the atmospher, using half of all solar energy absorbed by land surfaces in the process. We also calculate CO2 uptake by terrestrial vegetation by connecting transpiration losses to carbon assimilation using water-use efficiency ratios of plants, and show the global gross primary productivity to be 129 +_ 32 gigatonnes of carbon per year, which agrees, within the uncertainity, with previous estimates. The dominance of transpiration water fluxes n continental evapotranspiration suggests that, from the point of view of water resource forecasting, climate model development should prioritize improvements in stimulations of biological fluxes rather than physical (evaporation) fluxes.