Cauvery Calling
A river in southern India. Consequences that reach into our weather, our air, our food — wherever we are.
The Cauvery river runs through southern India, through the lives of 84 million people who depend on it for water, food, and livelihoods. Decades of deforestation along its banks have reduced it to a fraction of what it once was — seasonal where it was once perennial, shrinking where it once sustained. Cauvery Calling is working to change that. The approach is straightforward: work with farmers whose land borders the river, give them high-value trees to plant, and make tree-based agriculture more financially rewarding than conventional farming. Farmer incomes go up. Tree cover returns. The river begins to recover. More than 122 million trees have been planted so far.
Here is what makes this more than a local story. Trees do something most people don't know about. Through their leaves, they release enormous amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere — not just locally, but continuously, in volumes that rival the rivers beneath them. That vapour rises, travels on wind currents, and falls as rain in places far away. Scientists call these pathways flying rivers — invisible streams of moisture in the sky, generated by forests and delivered across continents. When forests disappear, these rivers thin. Rainfall patterns shift. Droughts appear in places that seem entirely unconnected to the forest that was lost. This is not unique to one region. The Amazon does it for South America. The Congo does it for central Africa. The forests of South and Southeast Asia do it for vast parts of the world. Every major tropical forest is part of the same planetary water system. What happens to any one of them reaches further than its borders.
The rivers of the world need attention for the same reason. Most originate in or flow through tropical regions where forest cover is declining. A river is not just water — it is the result of everything happening in the landscape around it. Cauvery Calling understands this. The project was accredited by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and supported by the UNDP precisely because it is not only about one river. It is a working model — the first of its kind — for how a tropical river can be restored through farmers, incentives, and tree cover rather than top-down intervention. The Indian government has already begun applying the same approach to thirteen other rivers. The vision is that it goes further than that.
Understanding how the world holds together — and finding your part in keeping it that way — some people find that is where wellbeing starts.
Find out more or get involved at cauverycalling.org (opens in a new tab)