Along sandy coasts worldwide, dunes provide essential flood protection services that are increasingly threatened by climate change. These coastal dunes are dynamic ecosystems where plants serve as ecological engineers, trapping and stabilizing sand through traits that both shape and respond to aeolian dynamics and dune development. Sea-level rise, altered precipitation, drought, and intensified storms are anticipated to impact these crucial plant-dune feedbacks. Through both adaptive and maladaptive responses, these ecological engineers will determine future coastal protection services. By leveraging a network of living labs and innovative mechanistic modelling, DUNELIFE aims to provide the essential knowledge to predict and mitigate eco-evolutionary maladaptation underlying the development of nature-based solutions for sustainable coastal protection. The project integrates field surveys, transplant experiments, and ecological modelling across three work packages which aim to: (1) assess ecological maladaptation at the community level by identifying trait variation along climatic-disturbance gradients; (2) investigate evolutionary maladaptation in the main ecosystem engineer (Ammophila arenaria) through transplant experiments and genomic analyses; (3) scale future maladaptation impacts on ecosystem services using virtual translocation experiments.