Queen Elizabeth owns most of the UK seabed, slowing conservation work.

Principia Scientic

Written by nationalgeographic.com

The royal family is called on to help recover Britain’s biodiversity, starting with royal properties.

Queen Elizabeth is well known as one of the largest landowners in the world. Less well known is that her holdings include most of the seabed encircling the United Kingdom, out to 12 nautical miles from shore.

That eye-popping detail of monarchical history is being seen in a new light as Britain’s declining biodiversity gains attention and the royal family has been urged to take on greater leadership in restoring nature—starting with the properties they control.

Yet lately efforts to restore coastal waters have encountered obstacles unique to this monarchy—ones that have chased a kelp farmer to a more welcoming reception in southeast Asia, for example, and that threaten to derail the largest effort to replant seagrass ever undertaken in Britain.

The U.K. is in no position to lose such opportunities, advocates say. Nearly half of the country’s wildlife and plant species have been lost since the Industrial Revolution, according to a biodiversity monitoring initiative launched last year by London’s Natural History Museum. Britain now ranks in the bottom 10 percent of the world and as the worst among G-7 nations.

Scientists describe the loss of seagrass meadows and kelp forests that ring the coastline in a single word: catastrophic. Nearly 90 percent of seagrass has vanished, much of it in the last 30 years to coastal development, overfishing, pollution, and damage by boats and anchors. Some scientists predict that most of the UK’s 26,000 square miles of kelp forests are likely to be lost by 2100.

When seagrass and kelp thrive, they protect against coastal erosion, serve as nurseries to coastal marine life, and absorb copious amounts of carbon dioxide. But gaining permission to restore those ecosystems requires a lease, with fees paid to the Crown Estate—the commercial real estate company that manages properties owned by the monarch.

The scientists and supporters involved in restoration efforts say the idea that people should have to pay for the chance to fix dying ecosystems for the good of the nation is wrongheaded. It is not the case elsewhere. In Florida, for instance, the state government owns coastal waters, makes patches available for restoration without charge, and in some cases requires developers to fund restoration projects, says Susan Bell, a University of South Florida marine ecologist.

Richard Unsworth, a marine ecology professor at Swansea University in Wales, whose Project Seagrass in one of the U.K.’s most prominent marine restoration efforts, is incredulous that the Crown Estate “would charge us to plant seagrass on their seabed.”

Together with the World Wildlife Fund and Sky Ocean Rescue, Unsworth developed plans to replant 7,500 acres of seagrass in hundreds of sites around the U.K. shoreline. The lease for a five-acre (two-hectare) test site off the coast of Wales, came with a $3,100 fee (£2,500), and Unsworth says he fears the fees for the rest of the campaign could render it unaffordable.

Much of the funding for the campaign is to be raised locally from donations of £10 or £5.

“We get kids emailing us trying to get all their friends to donate for their birthday parties, rather than giving each other presents, you know? And we’re passing that money on to the queen,” Unsworth says. “It’s just messed up, let’s face it. There’s no moment I’ve thought, actually, they’re trying to help us.”

Meanwhile, a Hampshire-based firm that planned a network of 58 small kelp farms around the country, hoping to grow biomaterials for plastics, cosmetics, and cattle feed while also boosting marine biodiversity and storing carbon waited through a year of delays trying to secure leases from the Crown Estate and licenses from the government. When his investors ran low on patience, says Howard Gunstock, co-founder of Carbon Kapture, he relocated kelp production to southeast Asia.

“If I can’t execute, my timing window goes,” says Gunstock. “And then 18 months later, those contacts are dead to me.”

Queen and seabed go way back

The queen’s vast holdings, including the seabed, date to the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror claimed all England for the crown. Today, the queen remains, by law, the ultimate legal owner of all land, although this gives her no power over most of it. She has complete control only over her privately owned estates, including Balmoral and Sandringham.

But as monarch she continues to own and derive revenue from the seabed and half the foreshore—the land between the high- and low-tide lines—as part of an eclectic set of crown assets that also include all silver and gold deposits and swathes of valuable central London real estate.

This $18.1-billion (￡14.4-billion) portfolio is managed on behalf of the queen by the Crown Estate, as part of an arrangement that began in 1760 with a deal between Parliament and King George III. At the outset of the king’s reign, years before he confronted American revolutionaries, he faced a financial crisis that led him to hand over control of crown properties in exchange for a set annual fee from income of those properties.

Today, this “unique—peculiarly British—organisation,” as the U.K. Parliament has called the Crown Estate, combines a royal endowment with a public investment fund. Earnings go to the public purse, with a quarter of them paid back to the royals. In the last decade, the Crown Estate has made $3.7 billion (£3 billion) for the royal family and Treasury.

The majority of these earnings come from urban property, including most of London’s famed Regent Street. The seabed has only recently become a big earner for the Crown Estate, with marine revenues of £121 million in 2021, from sources including offshore wind leases, pipelines, and cables.

Parliament has chided the Crown Estate for its emphasis on revenue generation, which “appeared to prevent the [Crown Estate’s managers] taking full account of potential wider public interests.” The announcement of an expected $11 billion (£8.8 billion) revenue windfall over the next decade from the sale of leases for offshore wind farms provoked a backlash in Parliament. It prompted calls from lawmakers that the archaic institution be brought up to date—or be stripped of its management duties.

“The seabed is more than a cash cow for the Crown Estate and the Treasury,” says Luke Pollard, a member of Parliament from the coastal city of Plymouth. “In the middle of a climate and ecological crisis we need the Crown Estate to put nature and carbon on the same level as receipts for offshore activity.”

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Via https://principia-scientific.com/queen-elizabeth-owns-most-of-the-u-k-seabed-that-is-slowing-conservation-work/