<p>Climate change is placing growing pressure on coastlines, increasing the need for shoreline protection strategies that are both resilient and sustainable. Hybrid shorelines, which combine natural features with engineered structures, offer a promising approach. However, existing guidance often fails to effectively integrate ecological and engineering principles, limiting their design and performance. In this review, we synthesize evidence on current coastal defense performance and introduce a system-based framework for designing hybrid shorelines that strengthen ecological resilience and infrastructure longevity. The framework explicitly incorporates climate change into design, supports multiple performance objectives, and emphasizes the importance of evaluating tradeoffs and co-benefits across ecological scales to avoid unintended impacts on biodiversity and climate mitigation. We also provide an adaptive roadmap that translates these principles into a structured design and implementation process, offering practitioners a pathway for developing resilient coastal projects.</p>