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Coastal settlements face many hazards from climate change. Consequently, there has been extensive focus on developing and implementing adaptation. However, these efforts have prodominantly centred on larger cities. Coastal towns and small cities (urban areas between 1000 and 100,000 people) have received little attention, despite experiencing a number of barriers to adaptation. The absence of information on the global scale of the adaptation challenge within coastal towns and small cities may have contributed to these settlements being overlooked. This paper develops a method that can be used to estimate the numbers, sizes, and locations of coastal towns and small cities worldwide from global population data (Global Human Settlement data). Denmark is used as a pilot for this method with settlements over 1000 people classified with relatively high accuracy. The method developed here represents a potentially fruitful approach to supporting coastal adaptation, as coastal towns and small cities are identifiable globally, they can be classified into types. This will support an assessment of their risk to coastal hazards, and could facilitate knowledge and practice sharing between similar coastal towns and small cities.