The overarching goal of the conference is to establish a consensus of the state of our quantitative understanding of the natural and anthropogenic mechanisms of regional to local sea level variability, to quantify remaining uncertainties and to foster the development of SL predictions and projections that are of increasing benefit for coastal zone management. The major outcome from the conference will be an assessment of the current state of the sea level science, an outline of future research requirements for improving our understanding of sea-level rise and variability and a description of the observational requirements (both experimental and sustained systematic observations).