Cambridge Nature Network Final Report

FOREWORD

I’m delighted to introduce this important report. For years, now, we have known we need to ensure nature’s recovery, and for years that has been an all-too-elusive ambition. In fact, we are still overseeing nature’s decline. It’s a ship that simply must be turned around.

Now we have a clear way forward. This report, building on the ambition to double nature in Cambridgeshire, tells us precisely how and where we can do it. Working from the ground up, looking at real places and the actual state of nature, it offers for the first time a tangible plan for the revitalisation of nature in the 10km around the city of Cambridge, based on what

is already there and how it can be brought back to life. And there’s more. Fully integrated

with the vision for nature recovery is one for the enhancement and creation of green spaces for public recreation and refreshment – vital needs, as we have come to understand fully during the covid-19 crisis.

The risk with nature recovery is that in our enthusiasm we may do the wrong thing in the wrong place: plant trees on peat or valuable grassland, or put hedgerows in where the landscape should be open. This report will ensure we do the right thing in the right place. It provides a place-based analysis of where existing nature sites can be enhanced, what kind of nature-friendly farming to encourage, how to create stepping-stones to create new, linked nature networks, and how, overall, the ambition for doubling nature can be met. Of course in our hearts we know that in a nature-depleted county like Cambridgeshire we will need to do more. But this approach is a foundational one; once started it will galvanise efforts to do even better. And above all it will guide funding from whatever source is available: including the new ELMS support scheme for farmers; new planning measures to achieve Biodiversity Net Gain; sponsorship or corporate donations; and the activity of the many nature-focused organisations in the area so that we achieve the right ends in the right places.

This is a landmark report, and I congratulate those whose vision and support have made it possible, especially the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, who funded the report and the underlying work, and James Littlewood of Cambridge Past Present and Future, Martin Baker of the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, and Matthew Bullock of Cambridge Ahead and his colleagues on its Youth Advisory Committee, who worked to bring this report to fruition. I also thank our small advisory group: Sir Nicholas Bacon, John Torlesse, Kim Wilkie and Robert Myers whose wisdom has shaped the final report.

Please read, absorb and act on what is in this report. It is, simply, crucial to our very survival. And if it can be done in Cambridgeshire it can be done anywhere. Above all, it is work that must be done if we are to get our relationship with nature onto a sustainable footing.

Dame Fiona Reynolds Master, Emmanuel College Former Director-General, National Trust

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The work to identify and progress a Cambridge Nature Network has been carried out largely by Cambridge Past, Present & Future and the Wildlife Trust BCN. It has been funded through a grant from the Gatsby Foundation to whom we are very grateful. We need to thank Matthew

Bullock and Cambridge Ahead’s Young Advisory Group who led on the research to understand

how a nature network could be sustained and who also provided secretarial support to the project team. Their work relied upon the co-operation of other organisations and so we are also grateful to the National Trust, RSPB, Magog Trust, Cambridge Sports Lake Trust, Cambridge University Botanic Garden and Cambridge City Council.

In the course of carrying out this work we have been granted permission to carry out surveys on private land and we have held discussions with individual landowners. They are too numerous to mention individually but we would like to thank them for their co-operation.

Finally, we also wish to thank the small advisory group that has helped to inform the project, chaired by Dame Fiona Reynolds and including John Torlesse, Kim Wilkie, Robert Myers and Sir Nicholas Bacon.

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