The cartogram represented in Figure 6b illustrates the relative vulnera- bility of the Atlantic European coast by scaling the surface area of each NUTS3 region in proportion to its vulnerability index score. As can be seen the regions with the greatest vulnerability (10% quantile) belong exclusively to United Kingdom (see the overall ranking in Figure B6). In fact, in the first quarter all but three, Cávado (17th) and Porto (22nd) in Portugal and Eure in France (18th), are on the British coast.

More specifically, on a scale of one to ten, the UK regions of Plymouth, Liverpool (9.8), Cheshire West and Chester (9.7), Chorley and West Lancashire (9.6), Lancaster and Wyre, Blackpool, East Merseyside (9.5), Warrington, Somerset and Mid Lancashire (9.2) lead the overall coastal vulnerability ranking, with six more with a score greater than 9.0. In contrast, the rest of Atlantic European countries have no regions with such high score. For example, the highest scores in Portugal belong to Cávado (just below 9.0) and Porto (8.9), in France to Eure (8.9) and Seine-Maritime (7.9), in Spain to Cantabria (7.1) on the Bay of Bis-

cay coast, A Coruña and Pontevedra (6.8) on the Galician coast and Fuerteventura (6.8) in the Canary Islands, and in Ireland the highest score corresponds to Mid-West (6.1) in the 72nd position.

By countries, the average scores are UK 8.2, Portugal 7.1, France 6.2, Spain 5.4 and Ireland 4.0 (see the country-level bar plots in Figure A6), with an overall Atlantic European average of 7.1. A fuller comparison between countries showing nationwide heterogeneity may be visual- ized using so-called violin plots, a combination of a two-sided rotated kernel density plot with a box-and-whisker plot inside showing the interquartile range (box) and data points at 1.5 times the box length (see Figure 7).

In this respect, UK shows a vulnerability score distribution quite com- pact and biased towards high values, while Portugal, in spite oh hav- ing an average score just marginally higher than for the whole Euro- pean Atlantic area, is the country with the highest regional hetero- geneity with a sustantial proportion of regions above the Atlantic European average, but with a large variation due to the lowest vul- nerabilities shown in Madeira (0.8) and Açores (4.0). Similarly, Spain, although with most regions below the Atlantic European average ex- cept marginally the above mentioned Cantabria region, shows a large variation due to the relatively low vulnerabilities of all the Canary Islands.

In summary, it can be concluded that within the European Atlantic Arc, the country with the most vulnerable coast is UK, where most regions are above the Atlantic European average. On the other hand, the country with the least coastal vulnerability is Ireland, with a quite compact distribution of all its regions well below the Atlantic Euro- pean average. Nevertheless, considering the whole picture, most of the Atlantic European coast appears to be quite vulnerable.