Selected
2025 Global Climate Challenge

Littoral

Powering predictive shoreline monitoring and foresight through AI, protecting coastal communities from weather-related disasters

Team Leader
Sarah Dole
Predictive coastal intelligence and foresight to adapt and protect coastal communities

The Problem: Climate change is driving the fastest sea-level rise in 3,000 years and accelerating erosion along sandy coastlines. Despite $18.3 trillion forecast for coastal protection, 680 million people remain at risk. Current interventions are often maladaptive. 


The Solution: Littoral provides predictive, site-specific intelligence to guide proactive, smarter, evidence-based coastal resilience. Using Predictive Coastal Intelligence, Littoral helps coastal stakeholders build resilient shorelines and adapt to climate change. Littoral’s geospatial AI pipeline learns how sand is moving from historical satellite imagery. Simultaneously, the language processing pipeline learns the history of human intervention from troves of coastal management documentation. The resulting synthesis of data provides a grounded and interpretable platform that explains changes to coastlines and helps prioritize nature-based protections, plan adaptation pathways, and optimize resource allocation across various spatial scales. For government agencies, developers, insurers, and local communities, Littoral delivers actionable intelligence to support critical decisions.

Stats:

  • Littoral has onboarded two pilot customers.
What is the name of your organization?
Littoral
What is the name of your solution?
Littoral
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Predictive coastal intelligence and foresight to adapt and protect coastal communities
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Boston, MA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
Other, including part of a larger organization (please explain below)
If you selected Other, please explain here.
In the process of registering a For profit, B-corp model
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
We are addressing the urgent challenge of coastal vulnerability from accelerating sea-level rise—while enabling the shift to a low-carbon, climate-resilient blue economy and cities. Anthropogenic climate change is driving the fastest sea-level rise in 3,000 years, worsening erosion across low-lying, sandy coastlines. A 2019 World Bank report estimates that over $18.3 trillion will be spent on coastal protection this century, yet even in best-case scenarios, less than half the world’s coasts will be protected. Despite this, more than 680 million people may still be displaced. The most affected communities often lack access to the data and tools needed for timely, adaptive planning. While real-time intelligence powers sectors like aviation and weather, no such global platform exists for coastline monitoring—leaving many regions vulnerable and underprepared. Our solution fills this critical gap. We are building a global coastal intelligence platform using satellite imagery and machine learning to deliver predictive, site-specific insights. This enables governments, developers, and communities to shift from reactive responses to proactive planning—favoring nature-based, low-carbon interventions over hard infrastructure. Much like global weather or air traffic systems, we need a real-time, continuous platform to guide climate resilience along the world’s coastlines.
What is your solution?
We aim to provide coastal communities around the world with a coastal intelligence platform that can be used to understand, predict and take-action towards creating a more resilient shoreline. Using earth observation data combined with artificial intelligence to track changing coastlines and forecast future changes to provide timely, actionable intelligence customized to your specific coastline or island. Our predictive monitoring system tracks the movement of sediment with satellite imagery, extracts relevant patterns from historical satellite data of localized shorelines, and uses those patterns to predict how sediment will move in the future. In tandem the language processing pipeline learns the history of human interventions or resulting decision outcomes from coastal management documentation like environmental impact assesment reports which results in a grounded interpretable data intelligence platform.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
A population of over 750 million are estimated at living in ≤ 10 m of the low-elevation coastal zone (LECZ) – and are at heightened risk from sea level rise (source: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-5747-2021). Our solution directly serves coastal communities—particularly in low-lying nations like the Maldives—who are on the frontlines of climate change. These communities are underserved in two critical ways: they lack access to accurate, real-time coastal change data and the tools to make proactive, climate-resilient planning decisions. Our AI-powered coastal intelligence platform fills this gap by using satellite imagery and predictive models to generate forecasts of erosion, shoreline change, and sediment dynamics. These insights empower governments, local planners, and vulnerable communities to prioritize interventions or selectively intervene, safeguard infrastructure, and protect livelihoods—creating coastal resilience in the face of climate change. Importantly, the data generated will contribute to an open-access, global dataset—democratizing climate intelligence and fostering collaboration between coastal communities. In regions where adaptation funding is limited and decisions must be targeted, our platform helps shift responses from reactive to proactive—improving resilience with transparency, foresight, and equity.

Organization Type: For-Profit
Headquarters: Boston, MA, United States
Stage: Prototype
Working In: Maldives

Solution Team:
Sarah Dole
Sarah Dole
Co-Founder/CEO
walter zesk
walter zesk