The Crown vs. Greenpeace: who owns the seabed?

Greenpeace is threatening to sue the Crown Estate, accusing it of exploiting its monopoly ownership of the nation’s seabed. The environmental group says that King Charles’ property management company has become “aggressive” in how it auctions seabed rights, and that this is hitting energy bill payers in the pocket.

Which seabeds do the Crown Estate own? 

In 1951, the foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, concluded that the waters around Britain and the land beneath them did not belong to anybody. But in 1959, the same year large quantities of gas were discovered beneath Dutch waters, the Crown Estate’s legal adviser “proposed enshrining in law the extension of Crown lands to the whole of the continental shelf”, said Prospect.

The 1964 Continental Shelf Act duly gave the Crown Estate rights to the seabed and subsoil, allowing for activities like oil and gas extraction in a range that, at its largest, extends to 200 nautical miles from the coast. The seabed is also leased out for offshore wind farms, cables, pipelines and aquaculture.

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Since then, the monarchy has “gradually plundered” the seabed, “transforming it into nothing less than a rentier capitalist empire”. From 2013–23, that empire is thought to have earned the royal family around £193 million.

What does that mean for the offshore wind sector?

Greenpeace says the Crown Estate has “exploited its monopoly position to charge hefty fees” for leases of the seabed, leading to a pricing system that’s “massively boosted the estate’s profits” and driven up costs for the wind power sector and, in turn, energy bill payers.

But a Crown Estate spokesperson told The Guardian that the environmental group has “misunderstood the Crown Estate’s legal duties and leasing processes”. Taxpayers, they said, “benefit” from the estate’s stewardship and development of “our scarce and precious seabed resource”.

What about other countries?

Countries across the world are “using the politics of nationalism to permanently stamp their mark on the topography of the ocean”, said The Guardian last year. Some are “seeking to demonstrate that a nearby seabed is part of their continental shelf and therefore belongs to them”, which allows them to “potentially extend its underwater sovereignty by as much as 350 nautical miles from its coastline”.

To make such a claim, they have to name the area they are claiming and they do this by petitioning the International Hydrographic Organization, an intergovernmental body with 102 member states.

An examination of this naming process shows the surge in interest in the seabed. Canadian geographer Sergei Basik, who coined the term bathyonyms to describe natural features on the ocean floor, has found that during the 20th century just 17 names for bathyonyms were proposed on average each year. Since 2016, more than 1,000 names have been submitted, with Japan leading the way on 615, followed by the US (560), France (346), Russia (313), New Zealand (308) and China (261).