The Shoreline between Nature and Society, a Changing Heritage - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 177

Figure 5.1. This model links together the interactions involved on the basis of five
factors, climate (in all the different meanings of the term), sea level, coastal dynamics
as related to climate and the sediment balance and partly related to coastal dynamics
and partly to human actions
The driver of the system is the climate, and it can be interpreted in
the wider sense at all the scales, both temporal and spatial. It includes
the weather as much as the climatic zone; the recent time-frame
(week, year, decade, etc.) as much as the great climatic oscillations
that have marked the Quaternary era and of which the coasts still bear
the mark (marine sediments reveal the movements of the sea; masses
of sediments washed off from the continents and sorted, reworked
during marine transgressions). On the coasts, it becomes clear that the
first effect of the climate is the wind, sometimes acting
through the sea (swells, waves, etc.), and on the coast itself, through