Coastal Wetlands of the World follows the book by Scott, Medioli and Schafer (2001) on Monitoring in Coastal Environments. We are motivated to write this new book based on concern about the status of mangroves and salt marshes all over the world, from pole to pole, and by the fact that few students have the chance to look at our changing shorelines from both a geological and an ecological perspective. Coastal wetlands are being destroyed and degraded at alarming rates, and only a fraction remains. These wetlands protect us from storm buffering and have extremely high primary production, making them important storehouses of carbon and energy, habitats that nurture juvenile stages of commercially important fishes and that filter our waste water – yet we continue to damage them faster than we can preserve them. In some areas, less than a third of natural wetlands remain along the coast, and very few are entirely unaffected by direct human impacts. Furthermore, all our coastal wetlands are changing in response to indirect human impacts: global warming, sea level rise and increasing numbers of severe coastal storms. These impacts are further magnified in the Arctic, where the pace of climate warming is four times faster than other places on Earth, and where disappearing sea ice is encouraging rapid expansion of oil and gas exploration, with the associated risks of long-lasting pollution damage. Arctic people say that ‘The Earth is faster now’ – and it appears that traditional methods of coastal living are no longer viable. It is likely that circumpolar regions are already irreversibly changed – and the spill-over impacts on global air and ocean systems is already being felt by people in crowded cities of warm temperate regions.