Coastal erosion at Lyme Regis

What the scenarios mean

• Periods: medium term, up to 2055, and long term, up to 2105. Distances are cumulative over time and given in metres: the 2105 figure includes the erosion up to 2055.
• Shoreline Management Plan delivered: the policies in the Shoreline Management Plan for each stretch (hold the line, managed realignment, no active intervention) are carried out.
• No Future Intervention: no defences are maintained, repaired or built from now on.
• Climate: Present day climate (as in 2020); the Higher Central allowance, which uses UKCP18 RCP8.5 sea level rise at the 70th percentile; and the Upper End allowance, at the 95th percentile.
• The headline figures on these pages use the Shoreline Management Plan delivered with the Higher Central allowance, the combination the Environment Agency uses for coastal erosion with climate change in its National assessment of flood and coastal erosion risk in England 2024. Unlike the previous NCERM, the 2024 data gives one figure per scenario and no percentile range of erosion.

What these figures cannot tell you

• They are projections from a national model, not a forecast for a date or a house. The Environment Agency says the data is for guidance only, cannot provide details for individual properties, shows areas of land likely to be at erosion risk rather than the precise future position of the shoreline, and that erosion may happen faster or slower than shown.
• Cliffs often retreat in sudden falls and landslides rather than a steady amount each year, so a figure for 2055 does not mean the same distance is lost every year.
• For one address, use the government's Check coastal erosion management in your area service. Shoreline Management Plan policy units and the plans themselves are in the Shoreline Management Plan Explorer. The local council's coastal team holds local monitoring and plans.
• This site gives no property, planning or insurance advice.

Wales and Scotland are not covered

NCERM 2024 is the Environment Agency's map for England, and these pages show England only. Natural Resources Wales publishes a separate NCERM for Wales on DataMapWales. For Scotland, past and projected coastal change is mapped by Dynamic Coast.

About this data

Data: Environment Agency, NCERM 2024 (published 28 January 2025), Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: National Coastal Erosion Risk Mapping (NCERM) - National (2024), Environment Agency, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025. All rights reserved. Read from the agency's OGC API Features service; built 2026-10-18.

• NCERM splits the coast into frontages, lengths of coast with consistent cliff and defence characteristics, and gives each one an erosion distance for each scenario. NCERM names no towns: each place here is a reference point (from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors) and the frontages whose centre lies within the distance stated on its page, or a named stretch of coast.
• "Up to" is the largest distance among those frontages; the median is the middle one. A frontage the agency maps as fully held by defences can show 0 m.
• Ground instability zones, where the data has them, mark geologically complex cliffs where land has moved before; the names shown are the dataset's own.