Coastal Resilience and Adaptation to Sea Level Rise

Coastal resilience and adaptation to sea level rise encompass the strategies and measures by which communities, ecosystems and infrastructure cope with increasing mean and extreme sea levels. Driven by thermal expansion of warming oceans and melting land ice, global mean sea level has risen at an accelerating rate, amplifying the frequency and severity of coastal flooding, erosion and saltwater intrusion. Resilience efforts span structural interventions—such as seawalls, surge barriers and nature-based solutions like restored wetlands—to governance approaches including adaptive planning, early warning systems and staged retreat. Effective adaptation requires integrating long-term projections of sea level with local land motion, hydrodynamic processes and socio-economic vulnerability. Multidisciplinary research has shifted from understanding physical drivers towards developing solution-oriented pathways, emphasising flexible management, equitable finance and community engagement. Across scales from small island states to megacities, the global significance of rising seas demands coordinated investment in data collection, risk communication and adaptive design to safeguard livelihoods, ecosystems and critical assets.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have quantified the disproportionate risks confronting small island developing states under both moderate and high warming scenarios, projecting that without adaptation, flood damages could increase more than fourteenfold by century’s end and that even stringent climate targets will not eliminate substantial economic losses. Another investigation has applied machine-learning techniques to derive high-tide flood thresholds at fine spatial resolution along ungauged coastlines, improving local hazard communication and enabling more precise adaptation planning. A complementary bibliometric analysis has mapped the evolution of sea-level rise science from pure physical science towards solution-focused research, revealing an expanding emphasis on impacts, ecosystem responses and adaptation measures, thereby guiding future assessments and policy engagement.

Coastal Resilience and Adaptation to Sea Level Rise publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in coastal resilience and adaptation to sea level rise across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

High-tide flood (HTF) threshold: the sea level above which routine tidal flooding of low-lying areas occurs, often used to signal nuisance inundation.

Digital elevation model (DEM): a spatial dataset representing ground surface elevations, essential for estimating population exposure and flood extents under sea level rise.

Probabilistic projection: a future forecast expressed as a probability distribution, capturing uncertainty in factors such as ice-sheet dynamics and ocean circulation.

Extreme sea level (ESL): the combined effect of mean sea level, tides, storm surge and waves associated with rare flooding events, typically represented by a defined return period.

References

1. Small Island Developing States under threat by rising seas even in a 1.5 °C warming world. Nature Sustainability (2023).
2. Establishing flood thresholds for sea level rise impact communication. Nature Communications (2024).
3. The evolving landscape of sea-level rise science from 1990 to 2021. Communications Earth & Environment (2023).
4. The sea level time series of Trieste, Molo Sartorio, Italy (1869–2021). Earth System Science Data (2023).
5. Probabilistic 21st and 22nd century sea‐level projections at a global network of tide‐gauge sites. Earth's Future (2014).
6. Projections of extreme storm surge levels along Europe. Climate Dynamics (2016).