Leonardo DiCaprio has been urged to withdraw support for a controversial tree-planting programme in India, which could result in catastrophic environmental damage.

An open letter, signed by more than 90 Indian environmental and rights groups, warned that the Hollywood actor and activist’s endorsement of the Cauvery Calling campaign was ill-advised. The signatories said the campaign could lead to the “drying up of streams and rivulets, and destruction of wildlife habitats”.

The Cauvery is an endangered river in southern India.

The letter praised DiCaprio’s work in “promoting rights of indigenous communities, protecting wildlife, case sensitively promoting conservation strategies, and, needless to state, pushing for clear action to tackle global warming”.

But the charities added: “It appears to us, the Coalition for Environmental Justice in India, however, that you may not have been appropriately advised in supporting the Cauvery Calling campaign.”

The letter continued: “This is not a programme that will protect Cauvery, her forests, her biodiversity, her children, and her children’s children. It will certainly not save Cauvery.”

The campaign was launched by the Isha Foundation, created by “Sadhguru” Jaggi Vasudev.

Sadhguru is a celebrity mystic who tours the world attending Hollywood events, offering spiritual advice and meditation tips, and has endorsements from numerous Bollywood celebrities.

The guru has made various controversial public statements, referring to one Muslim student as “Taliban” and calling liberals “fanatics.”

The Cauvery Calling campaign collects donations online to plant 2.42bn trees along the banks of the Cauvery river. According to a ticker on its website, it has already collected enough funds to plant 40m trees.

The Isha Foundation has released a detailed rebuttal of the main issues in the letter, calling it a “baseless opinion that contains blatant untruths and loose comments with no backing in facts”.



“The main argument is that the Cauvery Calling movement is proposing simplistic solutions, such as planting monocultures of trees on riverbanks. That is factually incorrect: The Cauvery Calling campaign is a comprehensive plan to plant trees on a portion of private farm land in Cauvery basin districts,” a statement from the foundation said.

But activists have said the tree-planting drive is too simplistic.

“The river has 81,000 square kilometres of watershed shared between four states,” said Leo Saldanha, co-ordinator of the Bangalore-based Environment Support Group.

Saldhana said that different stretches of land in the region had different requirements and that blanket tree-planting could cause enormous environmental degradation and a loss to farmer livelihoods.

DiCaprio posted an endorsement of the Cauvery Calling campaign on his Facebook page on Saturday, and his environmental charity Earth Sense has previously hosted the spiritual leader at an event in Los Angeles.

“Sadhguru has all kinds of endorsement from politicians to film stars and billionaires,” Saldahna said. “Environmental organisations are trying to develop proper, ground-up strategies to address these complex issues. They don’t work with us because we don’t use populism. We don’t use religion. This is an evangelical religious foundation. DiCaprio is a great actor and an intelligent conversationalist, but he is lending a hand and globally legitimising it.”

DiCaprio and his foundation have previously come under scrutiny in Malaysia, after a Department of Justice probe into alleged links to a money laundering scheme that reportedly supported his environmental foundation and his film The Wolf of Wall Street.

Sadhguru’s organisation has been criticised previously by India’s comptroller and auditor general for disregarding environmental and humanitarian laws and even building its Coimbatore headquarters on protected forest land known for its elephant corridor. The foundation has denied that it was built on an elephant corridor.

Environmentalists have also filed a court case against the Isha Foundation, alleging that the project started collecting donations for the programme before receiving clearances from state governments to plant trees.

DiCaprio’s publicists did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. The actor, who has repeatedly used his public prominence to decry the impact of climate change, is understood to have contributed at least $30m to environmental causes.

An email to the Isha Foundation also went unanswered.

• This article was amended on 26 September 2019. The Cauvery watershed covers about 81,000 square kilometres, rather than square metres.