We explore factors that drive the responses of coastal nations, communities and residents to changing sea-levels and assess the effectiveness of strategies that administrations and people follow in order to reduce damages. Our work includes studies on exploring the effectiveness of different adaptation measures (e.g. hard and soft protection, nature-based solutions) at global, regional and local scale; as well as household-level adaptation, at local scale, in various countries (e.g. Germany, Denmark, Greece, Argentina) and regions (e.g. Mediterranean Sea, Baltic Sea); and strive to incorporate our findings from these studies in global models of sea-level rise impacts .