About The Crown Estate
The Crown Estate manages a land and property portfolio across the United Kingdom, ranging from central London real estate to the seabed and rural estates. Its rural holdings run to approximately 200,000 acres, covering working farmland, historic traditional holdings, land held for housing development and sports venues. Each of those land types carries a different exposure profile, and a different set of people make the decisions on the ground.
The challenge: rural land that existing tools would not assess
The Crown Estate had already quantified physical climate risk across its urban real estate. Rural and coastal terrestrial assets sat outside that work, which left four questions open.
What the existing climate risk assessment could not answer
Rural and coastal exposure. The urban work stopped at the boundary of the built estate, leaving the majority of the land unquantified.
Comparability between land types. No basis existed for judging whether a farm in one county carried more risk than a coastal holding in another.
A consistent disclosure methodology. TCFD (the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures) expects one approach across the whole portfolio, and the existing work covered half of it.
Where to spend first. Without comparable figures, ranking adaptation investment across holdings came down to judgement rather than evidence.
Why the market could not close the gap
Existing products assessed residential and commercial buildings competently. Agricultural land, wind turbines and other non-standard assets fell outside their models. More than one provider told The Crown Estate plainly that they do not cover farmland and residential.
The team knew exactly what it wanted to measure. The obstacle was finding anyone willing to model it.
The solution: five climate hazards, three climate risk scenarios and a model built per land type
SmartResilience started from the opposite position. The data exists. The work was to agree how to apply it to land that does not behave like a building.
What the climate risk assessment covered
Scope: 100 assets across five representative rural and coastal estates
Hazards: flooding, wildfire, wind, heat stress and water stress
Horizon: projected to 2100 across three IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scenarios
Output: value at risk quantified per asset and per estate, plus ROI-ranked adaptation measures
Duration: six months end to end, run on the SmartResilience platform
A bespoke approach for each of the rural archetypes
The harder part was accounting for how differently each part of the estate operates. A working farm, a historic tenanted holding and a parcel earmarked for development do not share a damage function, a revenue model or a decision-maker. Treating them as one category would have produced numbers nobody could act on.
SmartResilience built a bespoke approach for each of the three rural archetypes:
Working farmland
Historic traditional holdings
Land held for housing development
Accounting for that diversity in size and land management practice meant the output reflected how each part of the estate is actually run, rather than how a commercial property model assumes land behaves.
SmartResilience then presented the risk exposure, the scenario overview and the ranked adaptation measures directly to the team, rather than handing over a data file.
The impact: identified avoidable losses, concentrated in a few locations
Flooding risk dominated, and it clustered
Flooding emerged as the most significant hazard across the pilot, and the exposure sat in a small number of places rather than spreading evenly across the portfolio. That concentration is what made the figures useful: the team could direct adaptation spending where it changes the outcome instead of thinning it across 100 assets.
Two estates carried material revenue at risk from annual average losses driven by flooding
Significant avoidable losses identified from tail-risk flooding events
Quantified share of land exposed to those events
A site that looked protected failed the stress test
At one coastal agricultural estate, existing coastal defences were reducing expected annual flood losses by more than 95%. On its own, that reads as a solved problem. The stress test said otherwise. Under a plausible worst case, a 1-in-200-year flood event may breach those defences and put almost a third of the land, 32%, at risk of flood damage.
The team read that figure carefully. A 95% reduction in annual average losses tells you the defences hold in a normal year. It tells you nothing about what happens when they fail.
Three things followed:
Insurance. The Crown Estate reconsidered whether its protection cover matched the actual exposure.
Coastal collaboration. The team opened a conversation with land users and coastal defence managers who share responsibility for that stretch of coast.
Long-term land use. Working through the same results, the team could frame questions it had not been able to put precisely before, including crop selection at sites exposed to saline intrusion.
The pilot produced a method that scales
SmartResilience built the archetype approach to extend beyond the five pilot estates. The Crown Estate can now assess the rest of its rural and coastal holdings on the same basis instead of commissioning each one as a separate exercise, which keeps the portfolio comparable as it changes.
See SmartResilience in action
If you would like to find out more about SmartResilience and how it works, book a demo of the system to discover how it can benefit your business.
