Towards a working definition of coastal community

The term “coastal community” is widely used in research, policy, and media discourse, yet remains conceptually ill-defined, inconsistently applied, and multivalent. The notion of coastalness often supports definitive - and sometimes contradictory - claims about community health, and socio-economic conditions, particularly when contrasted with “inland” areas. We argue that establishing a clear, consistent, and widely understood definition of coastal and inland communities is a critical precursor to robust, comparable research. Such clarity ensures that comparisons are methodologically sound and that resulting insights can meaningfully inform policy and practice. Drawing on a conceptual analysis of existing definitions alongside a structured assessment of available geospatial boundary data, we discuss this issue in the context of the existing body of research and the problems involved in precisely defining “coastal community”. We then propose a working definition of coastalness with respect to towns that lends itself toward meaningful comparative analysis. Our approach defines community as a bounded, named settlement and introduces a continuous, population-weighted measure of coastalness based on distance decay from the coastline. Finally, we discuss the limitations on generalisation of this approach to other settlements and outline future directions for research and policy engagement.