South Cambridgeshire district council plans to bulldoze a precious orchard of 100 year old fruit trees to build a £230 million ‘green’ electric busway… are at government approval stage.
They will chop down 520 apple, pear & plum trees, including six Bramleys dating back to the 1920s.
The route of the proposed Cambourne to Cambridge (CtoC) bus road, would cut across the countryside and destroy Coton Orchard.
Unfortunately, despite strong advocacy from experts, leading organisations, and local people, the application for a Transport and Works Act Order for the CtoC scheme has now been submitted. This means the local community now faces a costly public inquiry that will decide whether permission is granted.
The ISSUE
The Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP) want to build a new road from Cambourne to Cambridge (C2C). The road is only for buses (known as a busway). The proposed route will cut through fields, woodland and an ancient orchard. It will irreversibly damage landscape, views and habitats. It will bring unjustified urbanisation to the village of Coton – and it will cost a minimum of £200 million.
This C2C off-road busway would be a tragedy –
For wildlife and local ecology …
causes significant destruction of scrub, meadow and woodland habitats desecrates an ancient orchard – where no amount of new planting can compensate for the loss bisects priority Green Corridors – which are key to ecological recovery carves up Green Belt land with restrictive covenants in favour of the National Trust
For local heritage and local people …
ruins some of loveliest, most unspoiled views anywhere around Cambridge encroaches on paths used by walkers imposes unjustified urbanisation on the rural, historic village of Coton
For taxpayers and commuters …
does not make journey times to Cambridge significantly faster – a difference of only 1.5–3.5 minutes between on-road and off-road routes does not provide easy journeys to actual destinations apart from the West Cambridge Campus does not take into account current road usage data or evolving working–commuting patterns has a minimum price tag of £200 million and a benefit–cost ratio of only 0.43 – so is poor value for taxpayers’ money.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
There is a viable alternative route, along existing transport corridors which:
• is less damaging to the environment
• is far less expensive
• also offers better journeys to actual destinations.
The new bus road has been consistently rejected by the general public at every stage of consultation. And yet the GCP continues to pursue this option, comparing it only to the option of doing almost nothing.
The local community supports improved transport networks around the fast-developing city of Cambridge, but do not accept that this off-road busway is the best or only solution.
They call on the Greater Cambridge Partnership/Cambridgeshire County Council to listen to public opinion, save the green corridor, spare the orchard and find a better solution.
Unique 120-year-old Tree Fern gains international recognition.
A unique tree fern which has been housed in a glasshouse at Birmingham Botanical Gardens for more than a century has been officially recognised by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and included in their Plants of the World Online database.
Dicksonia × lathamii is a cross between the Australian tree fern (Dicksonia antarctica) and the elusive Dicksonia arborescens from St. Helena.
The hybrid was created over 120 years ago by William Bradbury Latham, the then curator of Birmingham Botanical Gardens.
Since its creation, this singular specimen has thrived in the Gardens’ glasshouse, standing as a testament to Latham’s pioneering horticultural efforts.
The recent update of Dicksonia × lathamii in the POWO database is a significant milestone in Birmingham Botanical Gardens future capital project plans.
POWO serves as a comprehensive global digital repository of plant names and taxonomy amassed over 250 years. By featuring in the database, the fern is now officially recognised worldwide, allowing researchers and horticulturists globally to acknowledge and reference this unique hybrid.
Alberto Trinco, Senior Glasshouse Horticulturist at Birmingham Botanical Gardens said: “The recognition of Dicksonia × lathamii in Kew’s Plants of the World Online is a significant occasion for us.
“It not only underlines the historical significance of this unique fern but also showcases the enduring legacy of Latham’s botanical expertise here in Birmingham,” he added.
While the hybrid’s existence was acknowledged by fern societies and experts, its official status remained unplaced due to technicalities in botanical nomenclature. The recent update in POWO resolves this, providing clarity and official status for Dicksonia × lathamii.
Harry Smith, Curator-Botanist at Kew’s Herbarium added: “William Latham worked at Kew in the 1850s before moving to Birmingham Botanical Garden during the height of Victorian pteridomania.
“This new specimen joins the original 1885 sheet in our herbarium, preserving the identity of Latham’s unique hybrid and strengthening the links between our institutions’ shared histories of fern expertise,” he added.
Home to over 30,000 plants and 10,000 taxa, including collections within four Victorian glasshouses and stunning outdoor landscapes, Birmingham Botanical Gardens remains a treasured ‘green heart’ of the city, offering a unique haven of natural and historic significance.
The image shows the Fanal Forest in Madeira, Portugal, characterized by ancient, moss-covered Ocotea foetens trees, some over 500 years old.
Key features include: Twisted branches and moss-covered limbs create an unusual landscape. It is a remnant of laurel forests that once covered Southern Europe.
At Fanal, the main role is undoubtedly played by the centuries-old Til (Ocotea foetens) forest – with trees that date back to a time before the discovery of the archipelago. They are part of the indigenous Laurissilva forest, which expresses itself in an impressive state of conservation given its vitality.
Portuguese settlers arrived after 1420, and are the first known settlers. The islands’ trees were cut for their timber, and Persea indica was the most sought-after. In the 16th and 17th centuries the southern side of Madeira was converted to sugarcane plantations. A system of levadas, water channels 80 to 150 centimetres (31 to 59 in) wide, was constructed of stone and later concrete to irrigate the sugarcane fields. Forests and shrublands were denuded to provide charcoal for the islands’ sugar mills. Goats, sheep, and cows were introduced to the islands, and forests were converted to pasture land, and the forest understory was grazed intensively.
Many exotic plants and animals have been introduced to the islands. A few are invasive. Plantations of Pinus pinaster and Eucalyptus globulus were planted at middle elevations. Eucalyptus has spread extensively on the south slope of Madeira, displacing native species.
The Madeira Islands laurel forest was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999, covering an area of 150 square kilometres (58 sq miles)
With deforestation rising and violence a constant threat, a bold initiative is using satellites to ensure U.S. supermarkets sell ethical, eco-friendly avocados.
Avocados are entrenched in American cuisine. The rich, creamy fruit, swaddled in a coarse skin, is often smashed into guacamole, slathered on toast, or minced into salads.
The nation’s demand for Persea americana has surged by 600 percent since 1998. Most of the avocados consumed in the U.S., and many of those eaten elsewhere in the world, are a single variety grown in Michoacán, a state in west-central Mexico with an immensely profitable export industry worth at least $2 billion annually. But this “green gold rush” has come at a steep climatic cost, as vast tracts of protected land are razed for orchards.
We are losing the forest,” said Alejandro Méndez López, who has been the secretary of environment in Michoacán since 2022. Every year, up to 24,700 acres are illegally cleared for avocado production. “The main contribution of Michoacán for climate change is land-use change. So I think the whole world should be concerned.”
The state government hopes to mitigate that through a certification programme that ensures packinghouses that ship the fruit to international markets are buying sustainably grown avocados. The effort, called Pro-Forest Avocado certification, launched last autumn, and uses satellites to monitor orchards for signs of clear-cutting. Ultimately, the aim is to do away with deals between processors and producers that aren’t adhering to Mexico’s sweeping anti-deforestation law.
That hasn’t gone over well with everyone in a business that has grown so profitable that it’s attracted interest from drug cartels and civilian militias.
Méndez López helped create this programme and is its public face. He has spent the past month meeting with angry avocado growers throughout Michoacán, always in a car outfitted with bulletproof windows and accompanied by police. Despite his attempts to ease their concerns, he says many leave no less irate. Their problem isn’t so much with him, but what his presence represents: the government’s rollout of a programme that is voluntary for packinghouses but leaves growers fearing they have little choice but to comply.
“They were very angry. I was telling them that this certification is not compulsory, but many of them believe that this is a hidden way to tax them,” he said. Given the powerful role cartels play in the avocado business, his efforts to address the industry’s ecological and climatic impact has created no small risk to his safety. Some growers have started anonymously boycotting packinghouses that join, denouncing them as “traitors.” “I don’t want to be killed,” he said. “I’m a bit afraid, because right now we are touching their economic interests.”
Climate activists and analysts say the programme could replicate the market changes seen with other ethical labeling efforts like fair trade coffee and dolphin-free tuna. Locals are more skeptical, and worry that the industry’s history of corruption will undermine progress. And there’s always the question of it receiving the support needed to succeed. But Méndez López believes this is a legitimate solution to a grave issue. Even threats of violence won’t deter the work.
“We have very few resources,” he said. “They can come to my office and put a gun to my head, but they won’t be able to shut down a satellite.”
Nearly a third of the avocados consumed worldwide — more than 2 million metric tons annually — are grown in Michoacán’s “Avocado Belt.” Fertile volcanic soils, elevated terrain, and warm, subtropical microclimates with ample rainfall make it the only region in the world with large-scale production year-round.
Michoacán started moving toward the center of the global avocado trade in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the U.S. to imports from south of the border. By 2007, it was the only Mexican state authorised to send avocados throughout the U.S. This provided consumers with year-round access to the fruit, which further drove demand. Since 2019 alone, avocado exports to the United States have surged 48 percent. (Some 90 percent are the market-dominating Hass variety.)
That explosive growth has brought opportunity to economically disadvantaged areas. Juan Gabriel Pedraza, an Indigenous Purépecha farmer in the town of Sicuicho, told Grist that his people plant orchards even as they strive to protect the forests. He raises roughly 720 avocado trees alongside the pines. The crop “has brought life” to his community, which was once “extremely, extremely poor.”
“We are like guardians of the forest, because if the forest disappears, then it’s going to affect everything else.” “We are always careful with keeping the forest healthy. It’s a duty of ours.”
Over the years, enormous avocado export profits have led to an escalation of violence that has surged alongside demand. Local cartels have bribed agricultural officials and police and extorted or kidnapped growers to maintain a stronghold in the lucrative business, while civilian militias have fought for control of their communities. Avocados are now Michoacán’s, and one of Mexico’s, biggest agricultural exports. This booming industry has triggered widespread violation of a federal law banning clear-cutting without government approval. About 95 percent of the deforestation in Mexico happens illegally.
The problem has since expanded to neighboring Jalisco, the only other Mexican state authorised to ship avocados to the U.S. Some 40,000 to 70,000 acres across the two states were cleared between 1983 and 2023 to grow the fruit destined for American supermarkets, according to a Climate Rights International report. It also found that major U.S. supermarket chains, including Costco, Target, and Walmart, bought from packinghouses whose supply chains included orchards on recently deforested land.
More and more, these forests were disappearing and being transformed into avocado orchards,” said Antonio González-Rodríguez, a forest conservation scientist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Michoacán’s capital city of Morelia.
In 2022, his team estimated that another 100,000 hectares of orchards could be established in Michoacán by 2050 — an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan — of which more than two-thirds would lead to forest loss. That includes protected reserves home to endangered species like the eastern Monarch butterfly. Such a loss would represent “more than 10 percent of the remaining forest,” said González-Rodríguez.
That comes with a staggering planetary cost. Chopping down forests eliminates vital carbon sinks and diminishes an ecosystem’s ability to store carbon. Meanwhile, warming threatens to reduce the amount of land highly suited to avocado cultivation by up to 41 percent worldwide within 25 years.
Clear-cutting also contributes to water scarcity by increasing soil erosion and disrupting natural filtration processes, throwing off the water cycle. Over the course of one decade, deforestation can have the same impact on a community’s access to clean drinking water as a 9 percent decrease in rainfall. This is increasingly an issue as Mexico faces a severe supply crisis.
It doesn’t help that avocado trees need a lot of water and are only getting thirstier as the world warms. Water demand for the crop in Uruapan, Michoacán’s second largest city, rose nearly 24 percent from 2012 to 2017, with orchards drawing 120 percent of the amount allocated to agriculture, creating shortages. Last year, droughts prompted some growers to illegally siphon it from lakes or basins into unlicensed irrigation ponds.
“The expansion of the avocado industry is creating a conflict over water,” González-Rodríguez said. “It’s going to become one of the more serious problems, socially and politically.”
Voluntary certification programmes that rely on public interest in fair and sustainable practices have reshaped consumer purchasing of everything from coffee to tuna. But assessing their impact can be difficult, said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
One fundamental flaw many of these efforts share is a reliance on self-reporting, with little accountability and inadequate follow-up. Those that operate independently of the government often lack regulatory oversight, while others attempt to cover so many products, or so large a geographic area, that they rarely disrupt large industries or markets, she said. Crops associated with widespread deforestation, such as the Cavendish banana, often end up bogged down in too many certification schemes, with multiple retailers requesting several iterations of “sustainable” labels. At worst, these efforts provide little more than greenwashing, and typically at a high cost to producers.
Michoacán’s Pro-Forest programme sidesteps many of those issues by focusing on a single product grown in a specific region and sold primarily to one international market. Its labeling scheme was created by a forest conservation nonprofit working in collaboration with the state government, researchers at local universities, and environmental organisations. It could soon end up boosted by Mexico’s federal government, which on January 30 announced the forthcoming launch of a national programme to eliminate deforestation and water exploitation for agricultural exports. A week later, Michoacán Governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla issued anti-deforestation certificates to six packing plants and two orchards that together supply roughly 31 percent of the state’s avocados sold to the U.S.
Orchards qualify for the scheme if they’ve had no deforestation since 2018, no forest fires since 2012, and do not operate on protected land. Government subsidies cover enrollment costs for packinghouses, while growers are charged about $40 for every 2.5 acres for certification. Growers must also pay for the conservation of a forest area to make up for the water consumption of their avocado cultivation. In a “plus” version of the programme, companies commit to prioritising buying from locally certified orchards. (No incentive for this tier exists just yet).
So far, about 10 percent of the state’s packinghouses that send avocados to the U.S. have signed on. That means they’ve agreed to be informed which orchards are complying with the guidelines — and to cease working with those that do not. Packinghouses that continue buying from orchards in violation of the anti-deforestation guidelines lose the ability to certify their avocados as sustainably sourced.
But no one is promising to buy avocados only from orchards bearing the state’s official seal of approval, because there simply aren’t enough of them. As it stands, 937 out of the state’s 53,105 orchards have signed up, a number that changes almost daily, Heriberto Padilla Ibarra told Grist. Ibarra leads Guardian Forestal, the nonprofit overseeing the program’s remote sensing efforts.
The scant participation may reflect the fact that local producers must pay for certification that packinghouses receive for free. It could also be because growers like Icpac Escalera have little faith in government initiatives. Escalera runs his family’s organic avocado orchard in the town of Acuitzio del Canje. Although he considers the labeling a valiant effort, he says the 2018 date barring deforestation “is not enough.” He also doubts the state has sufficient resources to enforce it, and is worried that it will further disenfranchise smaller producers “without political clout.”
“The political situation hasn’t really helped anything in terms of making sure that deforestation is being properly handled,” Escalera said. “Many politicians have avocado fields. It’s a well-known secret. There are not enough incentives for the smaller producers to maintain the forest, and because of that, the forests are disappearing.”
All the while, global demand for avocados continues to soar. Production in other top exporters like Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic is booming, and breeders are developing new varieties. Even as avocados could overtake pineapples and mangos to become the world’s most traded tropical fruit as early as this year, regulators are stepping in to minimize their environmental and climatic impacts.
The European Union is set to begin implementing “deforestation-free” product regulations in December. The United States took strides in that direction one year ago when several senators urged the Biden administration to address the role the country takes in driving the crisis as a primary market for avocados. Ken Salazar, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, announced that avocados grown in illegally cleared orchards should be blocked from the market, before the administration released a policy framework on how to begin doing so for all agricultural imports in December.
President Donald Trump has yet to address the topic. But the impending threat of tariffs on Mexico imply the administration may be interested in doing something about it, if for no reason than to limit overall imports from the country, said James Sayre, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. “In a way, the Trump administration could end up acting on the deforestation issue,” he said.
Despite the controversial reputation of product labeling, Méndez López remains optimistic about Michoacán’s certification initiative. He hopes to see Mexico and its biggest avocado market federally mandate the need for such schemes. “It would be wonderful if the U.S. had a compulsory [requirement] for the imports of avocado to be deforestation-free. That would be perfect. But, we didn’t get so far [with the Biden administration]. And I don’t know if this new administration will do that,” he said.
For Julio Santoyo Guerrero, an environmental activist in the Michoacán municipality of Madero, the program, while “barely a lifeline” is at least a measure that warns people of the dire ethical and environmental costs linked to every avocado they consume.
“Our biggest cancer is corruption … I believe that the cause that originated the expansion of avocados, the market demand, will be the same thing that can stop it,” said Guerrero. “If the market continues to function without regulation, our forests will continue to be destroyed.”
The Cavally Forest Reserve is one of the largest of 234 classified forests in Côte d’Ivoire, covering an area of 67 593 hectares..
In 2020, Nestlé began working in collaboration with the Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Water and Forests (MINEF) and Earthworm Foundation to protect and restore the Cavally Forest Reserve.
The initiatives in Cavally Forest Reserve are designed to include local people in moving beyond just protecting forests to proactively restoring them and helping them to thrive – which stems from Nestlé’s Forest Positive strategy.
Nestlé’s CHF 2.5-million investment supports incentives for local community members to preserve and regenerate the forest, allowing them to feel a sense of ownership and prevent further illegal farming.
In 2002 the Nestlé’s Cocoa Plan distributed over 1 million fruit and forest trees directly to the cocoa farmers Nestlé work with in Côte d’Ivoire.
As well as regular patrols, reforestation is a major objective. Nestlé’s funding helps to set up nurseries to begin growing native trees as seedlings, which can then be sown in the cleared forest areas. Two rounds of maintenance take place in the following months to make sure that the seedlings are growing successfully.
The preliminary results of the initial, three-year project that was funded by Nestlé and ran until the end of June 2023 were very encouraging. During its first phase, the Cavally project led to a significant reduction in deforestation, the natural regeneration of 7000 hectares, and the reforestation of almost 1500 hectares. In addition, greater economic and social resilience has been observed within local communities, with more than 1400 people benefiting financially from the project.
The project is now welcoming new partners to achieve a greater impact. These partners include the Swiss Federal Administration (SECO) via the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa (SWISSCO) as well as companies Touton and Cocoasource, which work directly with cocoa and rubber cooperatives in the area affected.
To combat deforestation and tackle the root causes of the problem, a collective approach based on creating value for producers and rural communities is required.
“The Cavally project is a very important initiative for us, as it allows our company to act directly within our supply chain. We are protecting a forest adjacent to the areas where we source cocoa and creating value for the farmers we work with. We’re delighted to have been able to contribute towards the success of this first phase and look forward to working with new partners to intensify the project’s impact further,” explained Corinne Gabler, Head of Confectionery & Ice Cream at Nestlé.”
Tree Weaver 