Introduction

The seas around Shetland have sustained communities for centuries. Fishing grounds, navigation routes, and shared marine space are not abstract concepts here; they are working environments, cultural inheritance, and economic foundations.

In recent years, the seabed around Shetland has become a focal point for large-scale energy development. Offshore wind, associated infrastructure, and export cables are being proposed and advanced at speed, often framed as matters of national or global necessity.

Yet the basic questions are the same as they are on land: who has the authority to decide what happens here, on what basis is that authority exercised, and who bears the consequences when those decisions are made?

This section looks at energy developments affecting Shetland’s sea and seabed through four lenses: authority, consent, consequences, and accountability.

Authority

Decisions affecting the seabed are often more remote from local scrutiny than decisions affecting land. Authority is exercised through national bodies and licensing regimes, frequently at a distance from the communities most affected by the outcomes.

Energy developments at sea rely on asserted rights over the seabed — rights to lease, license, occupy, and exclude others from areas that were previously shared and open. These rights are treated as settled, yet they are rarely explained or examined in public-facing decision-making.

For local people, this can make authority feel abstract and unchallengeable. Decisions appear to arrive fully formed, with consultation limited to how — not whether — development proceeds.

Shetland First does not dispute that authority is claimed. It asks where that authority is said to come from, how it is defined, and whether it has ever been clearly demonstrated in relation to Shetland’s seabed.

What Was Promised

Offshore energy developments are presented as clean, efficient, and largely invisible contributors to national energy goals. They are promoted as compatible with existing marine activity and as bringing long-term economic benefit, often with minimal local disruption.

Promises commonly include careful spatial planning to avoid conflict with fishing, temporary rather than permanent exclusion, economic benefit through jobs and contracts, and minimal environmental impact once construction is complete.

As with onshore projects, these assurances are central to the case for development. They are used to justify the scale of activity proposed and the extent of change to marine space.

What Is Being Delivered

In practice, offshore energy developments can have lasting and cumulative effects on how marine space is used.

Safety zones, cable corridors, and turbine arrays create areas where fishing and navigation are restricted or excluded entirely. What begins as a single project can, over time, lead to significant loss of access to traditional fishing grounds.

Cables laid across the seabed introduce additional constraints. Once in place, they shape where other activity can occur and can limit future choices. Repairs, monitoring, and protection zones extend these effects over decades.

Economic benefits are often unevenly distributed. While large contracts and revenues flow through national and international structures, the impacts — reduced access, altered ecosystems, and constrained livelihoods — are experienced locally.

Environmental Risks

Marine energy developments are frequently described as environmentally benign once operational. However, the seabed is not an empty surface. It is a living system, sensitive to disturbance and slow to recover.

Foundation installation, cable trenching, and ongoing maintenance disturb sediments and habitats. Over time, infrastructure alters currents, sediment movement, and ecological patterns in ways that are not always fully understood at the point of approval.

As with onshore developments, there is limited publicly available evidence of long-term, independent monitoring of cumulative environmental effects, particularly when multiple projects begin to overlap.

When developments are permanent, uncertainty itself becomes a risk.

Cumulative Effects and Exclusion

Perhaps the most significant issue at sea is cumulative change.

Each project may be assessed individually, yet the sea is experienced as a whole. Multiple developments, each occupying its own area and justified in isolation, can collectively transform how marine space is accessed and used.

For fishing communities, this is not a theoretical concern. Loss of grounds, increased steaming distances, and reduced flexibility all affect viability. Over time, exclusion becomes normalised, even if no single decision ever explicitly authorised it.

Accountability

Decisions affecting the sea and seabed are often taken through layered processes involving leases, licences, consents, and national policy objectives. When developments are approved individually, responsibility can appear dispersed, even as their combined effects become permanent.

Yet the consequences of offshore energy developments are not abstract. Marine space, once occupied and constrained, is not easily restored. Fishing grounds can be lost or fragmented, navigation altered, and long-established patterns of use displaced. These changes endure long after the moment of approval has passed.

Accountability therefore cannot end at consent.

Shetland First does not begin from the assumption that offshore energy must either proceed or be rejected. It begins by asking whether the arguments used to justify such developments — including Net Zero objectives — are coherent, evidence-based, and capable of withstanding scrutiny in the specific context of Shetland’s sea and seabed.

Where large-scale, exclusionary use of shared marine space is proposed, the justification for doing so matters. If that justification rests on assumptions that cannot be clearly explained, independently examined, or plausibly defended, then the rationale for permanent change necessarily falls with them.

This is not a call for obstruction, nor a rejection of environmental responsibility. It is a refusal to treat any policy framework as immune from examination when it is used to authorise irreversible change.

Decisions of this scale demand more than good intentions. They require demonstrable authority, meaningful consent, and continuing accountability — not just at the point of approval, but over the lifetime of the infrastructure and its effects.

Those requirements are not radical. They are the minimum conditions for responsible stewardship of shared marine space.