Coastal Sustainability Under Development Pressures: A Narrative Review of Degradation Drivers and Governance Responses

Coastal zones rank among the most productive, densely populated, and rapidly transforming systems on Earth, yet the very development that sustains them increasingly compromises their long-term viability. Drawing on the international coastal management and marine science literature, this narrative review traces the ways in which human development along the coast drives environmental degradation and, in turn, elicits institutional and ecological responses. It shows that three principal activities—land reclamation, mariculture and marine aquaculture, and urban coastal sprawl—recur as the sources of a recurring suite of environmental harms, spanning shoreline erosion, plastic and heavy-metal pollution, invasive-species incursions, and the loss of blue-carbon habitat. In response, a growing literature documents integrated coastal management, marine functional zoning, carrying-capacity assessment, and climate-adaptive and nature-based solutions as progressively more integrated instruments of governance. The review argues that these three stages form a single development–degradation–response cycle, and that whether that cycle closes constructively depends less on the mere presence of development than on the quality of the governance response it elicits. Across the cases synthesized here, the most acute pressure–degradation couplings arise where rapid urbanization and intensive coastal use coincide with weak or fragmented governance, whereas durable institutions of integrated coastal management and zoning have demonstrably contained or reversed degradation. The review closes by identifying the most pressing research gaps and the policy levers available to decision-makers seeking to reconcile coastal development with sustainability.