Shoalhaven council manages 165 kilometre of open coast, largest among New South Wales councils. It houses a number of infrastructures, both public and private, around its beaches which has high tourism value. The life span of some of the coastal infrastructure is long enough to be affected by sea level rise (SLR) and associated erosion processes. As a part of council's development of long term adaptation action plans, this study was initiated by the council to rank eight of their highly exposed beaches in terms of vulnerability to SLR.

We start from the results of the hazard studies, commissioned by the council, which mainly focused on the bio-physical risk of these beaches (i.e., identify at risk infrastructure). However, from council's point of view, the challenge remains how to identify the socio-economic and institutional implications of the identified in-frastructure risks and the cascading impacts of failure of the at risk infrastructure. We work with the council to develop vulnerability models, tailored to Shoalhaven context by combining biophysical risks with their socio-economic and institutional implications. An infrastructure interdependency model is also developed us-ing system dynamics (SD) concept to account for interdependency of Shoalhaven infrastructure.

In this paper we present the assessment results and also include an analysis of the sensitivity of vulnerability rankings to uncertainty and community preferences. Results show that in the base case scenario Mollymook and Collingwood are the two most vulnerable beaches. Our analysis show that base case ranking may vary with the selection of particular community preference scenario.