The English Royal Monarchy Plunders the Sea with No Accountability
“Its Good to be the King”
In 1964 the government passed the Continental Shelf Act, effectively passing ownership of the UK seabed to the business managing the rest of the monarchy’s property portfolio from that point onward. “Everything in the marine environment, in the absence of anyone else owning it, belongs to the Crown Estate,” says Thomas Appleby, a lawyer and academic specializing in marine law at the University of the West of England in Bristol.
During King Charles’ tenure, Crown Estate commissioners will make decisions that will permanently change Britain’s seabed. King Charles III 0r, to be more precise, the Crown Estate—the commercial real estate business that owns and manages vast swaths of land and property belonging to the British monarch. Since 1964, the Crown Estate has laid claim to the UK’s entire continental shelf, reaching hundreds of kilometers into the sea, and with it the right to grant permissions to build offshore wind turbines, lay pipelines, and store carbon under the seabed. For years, the seabed was a sideshow to the royal family’s sprawling terrestrial property empire. A quarter of the Crown Estate’s profits goes to the British monarchy via a system called the sovereign grant, But over the past few years it’s leapt in value, as a result of the booming market for renewable energy. After rising incrementally for years, the value of the seabed doubled between 2020 and 2021. By 2022, the Crown Estate estimated its marine portfolio was worth £5 billion ($6.3 billion). Globally, there has been a dramatic acceleration in ocean-based industries, with the OECD projecting that the ocean economy could exceed $3 trillion by 2030. But the UK, with its 29,000 kilometers of coastline, has been an early mover in commercializing its coastal waters beyond the traditional sectors of oil and gas, seafood, and shipping.
But for years, the ocean has suffered as a result of human activity. Marine heat waves have prompted coral bleaching, microplastics are messing with ocean food chains, and falling underwater oxygen levels mean marine animals are finding it harder to breathe. “Human influence has not been good for the ocean,” says Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, a sustainability science researcher at Stockhom’s Resilience Centre and Stanford University.