Coastal Climate Change Adaptation: A Review of Engineering, Nature-Based, Governance, and Socio-Economic Adaptation Strategies

Nabiha Ashraf, Alankrita Mishra, Sandeep Thakur 

Adaptation is becoming a key part of climate policies, including the Paris Agreement, for coastal areas, which host a large proportion of the world's population. Coastal areas are prone to intensive urbanization and tourism, which can exacerbate the threats of sea-level rise, storm intensification, erosion, and saltwater intrusion. Existing reviews have examined engineering, ecological, governance, and socio-economic aspects of coastal system adaptation to climate change, but these studies have generally been limited to a single discipline and offer limited cross-domain information. Such fragmentation can limit their applicability to planners who are interested in context-specific, integrated solutions. This review offers a critical synthesis of engineering, nature based, governance, and socio-economic adaptation approaches used in coastal areas worldwide.
The synthesis suggests that no single adaptation pathway performs uniformly well across settings. Rather, the effectiveness of the strategies depends on asset density, ecological and sediment conditions, governance capacity, and the urgency of the hazard. Hard engineering solutions provide a stable short-term solution in urban environments, but they externalize erosion costs and interfere with natural sediment transport. Nature-based solutions provide greater ecosystem and long-term co-benefits but require specific physical conditions to be achieved, which diminishes their transferability. While governance instruments and socio-economic measures help ensure
effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes, they do not directly provide measurable reductions in risk. The review compares the domains to identify points of overlap, interdependencies between strategies, and implementation challenges unique to each domain, and highlights the lack of standardized evidence across domains as an area for future research. This study focuses on integrated, context-adapted solutions that account for physical, ecological, and institutional dimensions to support sustainable and climate-resilient coastal development amid rapid
environmental change.