Coastal councils around the world are likely to be affected by future climatic impacts such as sea level rise and extreme flooding. Shoalhaven City Council is responsible for the sustainable management of 165 kilometres of open coast, the longest of any local government area in New South Wales. In order to prepare a comprehensive coastal zone management plan, Council investigated present and expected future coastal risks on its beaches. Detailed studies identified eight beaches where coastal hazards would significantly impact private properties and public assets. In order to help decision-makers in prioritising management actions for the eight areas, an analytical tool is needed that would not only quantify the physical risks to infrastructure but would also be able to integrate social and environmental considerations towards a holistic assessment of the vulnerability of each beach area. Following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conceptualisation, the vulnerability of a community to a climate hazard can be seen as determined by the degree of physical exposure to the hazard, as well as the community’s sensitivity to its impacts and its ability to cope with, or adapt to, these impacts. Hence, vulnerability assessment presents a number of theoretical and methodological challenges, the most important of which are epitomized by the following questions: 1. how to determine, say whether a community with high exposure and high adaptive capacity is more vulnerable or less vulnerable than a community with lower exposure but lower adaptive capacity? (problem of compensation). 2. how to incorporate the imprecision and value-judgments inevitably present in multistakeholder vulnerability assessments while maintaining a consistent and robust scientific process? (problem of fuzziness). A new methodology has been developed at the University of Sydney that addresses these questions and offers a clear and consistent approach for conducting vulnerability assessments. The paper describes the application of this methodology to the ranking of vulnerabilities to sea level rise of eight beaches in Shoalhaven
