Councillors in Cambridgeshire voted on Tuesday for hundreds of trees in an orchard designated as a habitat of principal importance in England to be felled to build a new busway to tackle climate change.
According to reports, the county council voted by 33 to 26 to approve a new public transport busway, which will use optically guided electric or hybrid buses on its route, to provide links between Cambridge and Cambourne, an expanding new town eight miles outside the city.
Huge public opposition to the felling of trees in Coton Orchard has led to thousands of people signing a petition calling for them to be saved. Coton Orchard contains about 1,000 trees and grows 26 varieties of apples, as well as pears and plums.
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The vote is said to have come a week after Plymouth city council felled more than 100 mature trees in a scheme to regenerate and “transform” the city with a new walkway from the sea to the city centre.
Steve Oram, the orchard biodiversity manager at the People’s Trust for Endangered Species was quoted as saying that the loss of such an orchard “cannot be compensated for”,.
She had described the £160m bus route plan as an “utterly destructive proposal”, which “could never achieve biodiversity net gain due to the vast amount of damage that it will do to an ancient orchard full of veteran trees”.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
