The laboratory operates on the policy that the director takes the full responsibility of administration under the supervision of academic committee, and it heavily relies on broader national and international collaborations for cross-disciplinary integrations. The main objective of the KLCDD is to explore and develop new ideas, new approaches and new technologies for making the coastal environments more resilient to the impacts of natural hazards and human induced threats.

The research activities in the KLCDD are mainly related to coastal disaster and defence, including the mechanisms of generation and development, prediction methods and warning systems, reduction and protection technologies, and evaluation and management of coastal disaster. The laboratory has particular interests in the areas of sea level rise and its impact, formation and propagation of storm surge and tsunami, saltwater intrusion in estuary, warning technology of storm surge, coastal dynamics of disaster process and its induced sediment transport, prediction of change of environmental factors in coast and estuary, design criteria of protection engineering, innovative technologies for protection engineering, damage assessment and recovery measures of protection engineering, the impact evaluation of coastal disaster on ecological environment and social economy and countermeasures