Jonathan Warrick , Daniel Buscombe, Kilian Vos, Karin Bryan, Bruno Castelle, Andrew Cooper, Mitchell Dean Harley, Derek Jackson, Bonnie Ludka, Gerd Masselink, Margaret Palmsten, Amaia Ruiz de Alegria-Arzaburu, Nadia Senechal, Chris Sherwood , Andrew Short, Erdinc Sogut, Kristen D Splinter , Wayne Stephenson, Jaia Syvitski , Colin Woodroffe, Adam Young

Almar and colleagues (2023) are correct in stating that, “understanding and predicting shoreline evolution is of great importance for coastal management.” Amongst the different timescales of shoreline change, the interannual and decadal timescales are of particular interest to coastal scientists as they reflect the integrated system response to the Earth’s climate and its natural modes of variability. Therefore, establishing the links between shoreline change and climate variability at the global scale would be a major achievement. However, we find that the work of Almar et al.1 does not achieve this goal because: (i) the satellite-based method does not meet the current standards of practice and produces inaccurate results, (ii) the spatial coverage of the shoreline dataset is not adequate for a global analysis, (iii) the relevance of the statistical analyses between the shoreline data and independent variables is questionable, and (iv) the findings do not capture physical patterns of shorelines developed from field-based observations.