Studies of coastal evolution examine and explore the reasons why the position and nature of the shoreline alter from time to time. Although this type of approach has been practised for generations – by geomorphologists, geologists and engineers – events over the last two decades have brought a new immediacy to the subject. Generally there has been realisation that many of the world's coastlines are under ‘threat’ (see, for example the recent US Geological Survey Publication Coasts in crisis (Williams, Dodd & Gohn, 1990) or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report Global climate change and the rising challenge of the sea (1992)) and that environmental change is the consequence of human occupation of shorelines, to which adjustment (of some kind) is inevitable. Specifically, the spectre of rising sea levels has induced a strong political response as well as raising inevitable questions among scientists as to the state of our knowledge and understanding (processes that are not always convergent). It would not be hard to conclude that our knowledge is woefully thin. Despite many excellent studies from a wide range of environments, we are still well short of understanding how a coastline will respond or react to secular variations in forcing functions such as sea-level rise, storm intensity and magnitude variations or shifts in the sea state pattern. The commonest conclusion is to predict flooding or coastal erosion, yet such processes are clearly only part of much broader responses, which need to be viewed over a range of scales, in both space and time.