Evapotranspiration (ET) links the water, energy and carbon cycle on land. Reliable ET estimates are key to understand droughts and flooding. We develop a new ET dataset, DOLCE V3, by merging multiple global ET datasets, and we show that it matches ET observations better and hence is more reliable than its parent datasets. Next, we use DOLCE V3 to examine recent changes in ET and find that ET has increased over most of the land, decreased in some regions, and has not changed in some other regions