Human beings have responded to coastal hazards via a variety of means throughout history. One threefold classification of such responses by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 1990) and Klein et al. (2001) is as follows:

As technology has developed over the last few centuries, so coastal societies in northern Europe and elsewhere increasingly moved toward hard protection of coastal areas, often associated with extensive areas of land claim for agriculture and other purposes. Thus, hard protection has often increased the area of land that is vulnerable to coastal flooding, while coastal ecosystems have been modified or removed. It has also “locked” the coast at a position that frequently leads to sediment starvation and the need to progressively enhance the hard defence.

As the long-term consequences of these decisions have become apparent and new threats such as human-induced climate change and sea level rise have emerged, so...

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