A global assessment of coastal vulnerability and dominant contributors

Coastal communities around the world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change driven natural hazards. Yet, a global scale coastal vulnerability assessment has not been attempted to date. Here, by employing currently available global datasets together with the widely used Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI) approach, we assess present-day coastal vulnerability at the global scale. Our country level assessment shows that median coastal vulnerability is highest in Aruba, Benin, Togo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, French Guiana, Ghana and Liberia. At the IPCC AR6 region scale, Central North America, and Northern South America emerge as the regions with the highest median coastal vulnerability. Results at both country and regional scales indicate that tropical and subtropical regions are more vulnerable to coastal hazards. In countries with High or Very High median CVI, the dominant contributors to present-day coastal vulnerability are geomorphology, mean tidal range, and coastal slope. Global scale assessment of coastal vulnerability indicates that the most vulnerable coastal zones are located in tropical and subtropical regions of the world, where there is also a large concentration of countries with low adaptive capacity. Peer review information Nature Communications thanks Lars Rosendahl Appelquist and Daniela Pantusa for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.