The aim of this paper is to appraise the current knowledge on seawall performance and reliability, and to make the case for improved reliability assessments of vertical seawalls, which are used here as a representative for coastal flood defences. In order to achieve this aim, a brief introduction to flood risk management is first given. Then, vertical seawalls are introduced, and their most prominent failure modes are discussed. Reliability analysis is introduced within the context of flood risk management. More specifically, the fragility curve approach that is currently in use in industry is described, and its limitations are discussed. Finally, it is argued that recent advances in multivariate extreme value models would enable improvements to the approaches currently applied in practice. It is stressed that future risk assessment models of coastal flood defences ought to include multiple failure modes and their interactions, a thorough analysis of the model uncertainties, and potential computational costs, in view of providing practitioners with an improved and functional risk assessment tool. Carter, Magar, Simm, Gouldby & Walli
