Coastal climate adaptation, as a response to managing the increasing risk of inundation of coastal settlements and infrastructure, is a global challenge. As a result, there is a burgeoning body of studies recommending adaptation options, pathways and strategies generated by the research and increasingly private consulting sector. However, recent reviews of global adaptation performance repeatedly highlight a lack of implementation of these recommendations. It is argued here that one of the reasons why there has been a lack of uptake of these studies is that there has been inadequate consideration of the political risk, underpinned by lack of consideration of potential allocation and distributional impacts of adaptation strategies. The work presented here investigates the political risk of the most common coastal adaptation pathways and approaches (retreat, protect, manage). This work highlights the major political risk of especially pre-emptive planned retreat adaptation strategies. Hence whilst planned pre-emptive retreat may seem the most obvious adaptation approach from the perspective of minimising future risks to settlements and infrastructure, it carries the largest political risk and potential distributional impacts and this is likely to hinder the adoption of this adaptation strategy.