The Crown Estate: Prioritising Nature Recovery

Nature plays a crucial role in sustainability, serving as the foundation for life on Earth. 

Ecosystems provide essential services such as clean air, water filtration and pollination, which are vital for food production and human health. Biodiversity enhances resilience, enabling ecosystems to adapt to changes and recover from disturbances, such as climate change and natural disasters.

Natural environments also sequester carbon dioxide, mitigating climate change impacts. Forests, wetlands and oceans act as carbon sinks, absorbing greenhouse gases and helping to regulate the global climate.

As sustainability strategies mature, more companies are putting nature-centric policies and goals at the centre of their net zero paths. 

Anna Swaithes, Chief Sustainability Officer at The Crown Estate explores how she has embedded nature into her work. 

Please introduce yourself, your role, and your passion for sustainability.

I am the Chief Sustainability Officer for The Crown Estate, a role in which I ask how we can deliver lasting and shared prosperity for the UK, contributing to a net zero and energy secure future, to nature recovery at scale and to creating social and economic value with a focus on our impact in communities. As a major UK landowner, we have an important role to play as stewards across sea, land and city.

When it comes to sustainability, we are in the make-or-break decade. To get to a viable future, those of us living in industrialised, urbanised economies will have to completely reimagine our relationship with nature, unlearn many of our assumptions about the world and find new ways to live. 

I want to play my part in getting us there. Alongside my work at The Crown Estate, I'm actively exploring how I spend and consume, how I bring up my children, how I use my voice and how I let go of my 'old world' beliefs and practices and learn new ones that are fit for the future.

Please introduce The Crown Estate and briefly overview its sustainability strategy.

The Crown Estate is a unique, independent business with a wide-ranging portfolio that includes 50% of the foreshore in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including territorial seabed out to 12,000 nautical miles. 

We are also responsible for 200,000 acres of rural land including grassland, wetland and peatland, plus The Windsor Estates' 16,250 acres; and a real estate portfolio spanning 10 million square ft in London's West End and eight million square ft of regional commercial development space.

This diverse portfolio, spanning a large variety of habitats and uses, requires us to work in partnership – bringing together public and private sector organisations, stakeholders and customers to catalyse change. 

The Crown Estate’s strategy focuses on maximising our contribution to net zero, nature recovery, thriving communities and local economies, as well as making an important direct economic contribution via returning all of our profit to the Treasury. We seek to take a joined-up approach across land and sea, and to factor people, nature and climate impacts into everything we do.

What is The Crown Estate's nature ambition?

Our newly released Nature Recovery Ambition sets out company-wide nature goals and commitments that put nature at the heart of our decision making and raise the bar on nature outcomes we seek to deliver. 

The ambition spans sea, land and city, and integrates nature into all our other activity to support national needs including: the development of offshore wind and other marine renewables to enable secure and affordable energy; the regeneration of urban environments to support critical sectors like science and technology as well as new homes; and agriculture to support food production and rural economies. 

The challenges to nature are fundamental to the resilience of our climate, society and our economy. So this requires a joined-up, systemic and partnership-led approach that focuses on nature recovery alongside other outcomes, but is also prepared to reimagine how nature is valued in our business model and in our wider economy.  

Our nature goals focus our efforts in three areas:

• Delivering increased biodiversity
  
• Protecting and restoring freshwater, marine and coastal systems
  
• Increasing social and wellbeing benefits from nature
  

We set these goals based on our most material opportunities for impact.

It has been so important to work closely with others to help set our ambition.

We have engaged with more than 40 individuals from leading ENGOs, public bodies, SMEs, corporates, academics and trade unions to gather insights, test and validate our approach over a 12 month period leading to up publishing.

In addition to these three goals, their contributions led us to set four commitments that relate to the role The Crown Estate will play both directly and in catalysing action from others. These are to understand nature, design for nature, fund nature and partner for nature.

The 2023 State of Nature report declares that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world - how is The Crown Estate working to combat this?

Across our business, there are many examples of activities already underway in support of nature recovery.

The Windsor Estate has been recognised for its best practice in conservation, and through The Crown Estate Environment Fund— currently £10 million—supports farms with over 400 acres of new woodland and 200km of hedgerows being planted in the last two winters.

Recently, we introduced new Environmental Farm-Based Tenancy Agreements to integrate nature into our lease agreements with farmers. These are intended to establish a partnership approach between The Crown Estate and our farming customers with a shared vision for nature recovery alongside food production, and a willingness from The Crown Estate to support farmers to achieve this rather than expect them to bear all of the risk and cost.

We’ve unveiled our ambitious Marine Delivery Routemap, a long-term strategy to steward the seabed across generations, creating space for nature to be restored and to flourish alongside further roll-out of marine renewables to support the transition to net zero. The Routemap now guides all our decisions in the marine sector, including on leasing and investment.

We’re collaborating with Westminster City Council on our Park2Park initiative to create a permanent green corridor from St James’s Park to Regent’s Park to enhance nature, wellbeing, and climate change resilience, and to make the area more accessible and inclusive.

This will emphasise and reimagine the famous architect – John Nash’s – park-to-park connection, set out over 200 years ago, to help adapt it in a changing climate and give rise to a variety of opportunities and experiences in this part of the West End.

In Rushden Lakes, together with The Wildlife Trust and other partners, we’ll soon be re-introducing beavers into Northamptonshire for the first time in four hundred years, and we are planning and designing for nature from the outset of every urban regeneration project. 

Research by the Green Finance Institute in 2024 shows that nature degradation is slowing the UK economy and could lead to an estimated 12% reduction in GDP - how is The Crown Estate working to combat this? 

Nature is essential for our economy. It provides food, water, energy and raw materials. It can make us more resilient to the effects of climate change, absorbing carbon to control temperature rises, even mitigating the impact of extreme weather events such as floods or heatwaves.

In this way it helps us to manage risks to our economy, lives and livelihoods. 

We need to consider how we can close the funding gap on nature and biodiversity restoration across the UK by helping to align and leverage public funding, creating pathways for private sector development, supporting the development of nature markets, and funding research and pilot projects directly.

All businesses will need to look at their business practices and supply chains, to design solutions that are better for nature, from materials that we source in our supply chain to considering the conditions we create in our leases to embed the value of nature into decision making. This will require a proactive approach to land management in partnership with others as part of a system change.

What is the future of The Crown Estate's nature ambition impact?

As a significant landowner that manages and stewards land on behalf of the nation, we want to play a leading role in enabling nature to recover and flourish; and to be cared for as one of the UK’s most precious assets. 

We are making progress and we are raising the bar, but we have a long way to go. At the same time as acting within our portfolio, we must continue to learn how our activities fit within a wider systems context across land and sea, working collaboratively to understand ecosystem interdependencies. 

We must remain collaborative in our approach, transparent about our progress, and open about the challenges we encounter. Listening to and engaging others will continue to be a key theme. In the new year we will be sharing a further update, including more information on targets and our delivery plan for biodiversity, as well as more information on how we will create the right foundations for joined up action on freshwater, marine and coastal systems; and social and wellbeing value.

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