Coastal settlements face many hazards from climate change. Consequently, there has been extensive focus on developing and implementing adaptation. However, these efforts have prodominantly centred on larger cities. Coastal towns and small cities (urban areas between 1000 and 100,000 people) have received little attention, despite experiencing a number of barriers to adaptation. The absence of information on the global scale of the adaptation challenge within coastal towns and small cities may have contributed to these settlements being overlooked. This paper develops a method that can be used to estimate the numbers, sizes, and locations of coastal towns and small cities worldwide from global population data (Global Human Settlement data). Denmark is used as a pilot for this method with settlements over 1000 people classified with relatively high accuracy. The method developed here represents a potentially fruitful approach to supporting coastal adaptation, as coastal towns and small cities are identifiable globally, they can be classified into types. This will support an assessment of their risk to coastal hazards, and could facilitate knowledge and practice sharing between similar coastal towns and small cities.

沿海居民区面临着气候变化带来的许多危害。因此，人们广泛关注开发和实施适应。但是，这些努力主要集中在大城市。尽管遇到了许多适应障碍，但沿海城镇和小城市（城市地区的人口在1000至100,000之间）很少受到关注。缺乏有关沿海城镇和小城市适应挑战全球规模的信息，可能导致人们忽视了这些定居点。本文提出了一种可用于根据全球人口数据（全球人类住区数据）估算全世界沿海城镇和小城市的数量，规模和位置的方法。丹麦被用作这种方法的试点，定居点有1000多个，分类精度较高。这里开发的方法代表了支持沿海适应的潜在成果，因为沿海城镇和小城市在全球范围内都是可识别的，因此可以分为几类。这将有助于评估他们对沿海危害的风险，并可以促进类似的沿海城镇和小城市之间的知识和实践共享。