IT’S a battle that for a long time looked like being carried alone by the Sunshine Coast.

Capacity, its true meaning and measure, is a concept with which many understandably struggle.

Only 35 years ago, when there was plenty of everything here other than population, opportunity and profit, many were blinkered to the long-term costs of failing to properly plan for growth.

How different and more liveable would the high-density Alexandra Headland strip have been if the council of the day had found the meagre $1 million needed in the late 1980s to secure for parkland the mainly vacant land that stretched from Tantula Road down to Alexandra Parade.

How much smarter to have left that coast road as a link to foreshore parks and parking rather than turning it into the drag strip it is today.

And how much wiser would it have been, just less than a decade ago, to purchase vacant riverfront land in Duporth Avenue, Maroochydore, for the cost of the street scaping that was opted for instead?

By doing so, it would have made sense of the CBD planning conundrum that the council now faces.

Similar opportunities to balance growth with sustenance, of what was once one of the world’s most diverse ecologies, have been missed or ignored.

The wildflower plains of Kawana Island, which once carried some of the planet’s oldest living flora, were sacrificed by the state government of the day, which turned Crown land into development leases.

It was a story repeated north of the river as well.

THOSE decisions made by one of our own, then premier Sir Francis Nicklin, could have – except for the will of community warriors, as ex-Maroochy councillor Elaine Green points out in her new book, Green Legends – seen the coastal national parks, which help retain the region’s character, lost to development.

The first planning scheme for what is now a single region from Noosa to Caloundra is in the making.

Its objectives are to provide a framework for planning that puts the needs of the existing community and the environment on an equal footing with the demands of development.

Maroochy’s original town planner, Jim Birrell, 82, wants council to play hardball and make decisions informed by community interest regardless of the cost of potential litigation from developers.

You can say things like that from the sidelines with impunity.

When you are a council under pressure from a state government with a vision for exponential growth, and a prime minister talking up a big Australia of 35 million people within 40 years, things become more difficult.

But while the obstacles remain enormous and many, two reports in the past fortnight have underscored the need for everyone to slow down and more carefully consider consequences of exponential growth.

Last week’s Healthy Waterways report found the entire south-east Queensland catchment was anything but and in danger of ecological collapse.

Then, this week, a joint federal parliamentary standing committee on the environment and climate change found coastal carrying capacity would be severely mitigated by rising sea levels and weather events.

Climate-change naysayers were dismissive, but that tide is turning.

Any failure to mitigate risk would make the decision-makers responsible and, ultimately, the community liable for future damage to property and loss of life.

The Jennie George committee report recommended that property rights be removed from at-risk land, something the state government’s own draft coastal management strategy had earlier and specifically ruled out, and signalled a future where it may even be necessary to force people out of their homes.

Prime minister Kevin Rudd quickly followed up, telling business leaders the federal government would be claiming a stake in planning the future of our major cities.

The billions of dollars worth of infrastructure the Commonwealth funds will be dependent on planning that makes cities more climate resilient, more energy and water efficient and which delivers green transport and communication capacity.

Sunshine Coast mayor Bob Abbot was delighted with the George report recommendations for increased coastal vegetation buffers and vegetation corridors for future fauna and flora migration, from a coastline threatened with inundation, and its real focus on keeping future growth out of harm’s way.

He was not as keen though on Mr Rudd’s proposal, saying any future urban planning should not be carried out without the Australian Local Government Association at the table.

And he wants any growth focus to consider more than just fixing broken big cities and making them bigger.

Growth, he says, should be pushed away from the low-lying, over-populated coast and back into the country where the bulk of Australia’s population once lived.

Infrastructure, industry and jobs, coupled with good planning, he said, would be a lure for people who live on the Coast but never go to the beach, to head inland.

The events of the past week have clearly rattled the Urban Development Institute of Australia.

Queensland chief executive officer Bryan Stewart emerged from a board meeting to declare the challenges of climate change as the most complex policy issue facing government. But he said his members would not tolerate existing development rights being eroded.

“Government shouldn’t act precipitously and interfere with property rights” Mr Stewart said. “It’s too early to do so.

“There is a need to respect private ownership and existing rights without taking them away arbitrarily. Our interim view is that we need Commonwealth standards so there is no difference between states. But having remote Canberra bureaucrats over-ruling local and state levels is not necessary at this stage.”

Mr Stewart wants more discussion at Council Of Australian Government level to develop a national approach in consultation with the states and local government.

He described the debate over climate-change response as being in its early days.

The problem is that long-term planning decisions being made now impact well into the future, to a time when they may be untenable.

Sunshine Coast Environment Council said this week that the opportunity to factor climate-change risk into the new regional plan was being hampered by state laws that allowed developers compensation in certain circumstances where they lost value on potential development.

SCEC campaigner Annie Nolan said it was outrageous that developers who ignored the science of climate change and pursued development on vulnerable land could be compensated by the local government.

“Developers should be seeing climate change as a business risk and modifying their practices accordingly,” she said.

Premier Anna Bligh is dismissive of concerns about the future. Responding to the committee report and the prime minister’s call for a national model for the growth of cities, she offered the SEQ Regional Plan and infrastructure plan as an international award-winning model.

Given the state of our waterways and the huge population already at risk of the impacts of climate change and rising sea levels, the Queensland Local Government Association and South East Queensland Council of mayors are understandably less sure.

They have commissioned a detailed report into the region’s real population carrying capacity, a process LGAQ chief executive Greg Hallam signalled would start in the immediate future.

Population growth is the real elephant in the room.

This week Australian Greens leader Bob Brown called on Mr Rudd to explain the end effect of unlimited growth.

“Name the final point,” he asked him in parliament.

“What is the ultimate carrying capacity of Australia if you say that growth is dependent on population increase ad infinitum? The logic of that is that there is no end point, that we not only continue to cram people into this giant country with very limited carrying capacity, but we continue to cram our fellow human beings, all of whom aspire to life and happiness as much as we do, on to a planet which cannot bear it.”

Outside the senate he said no world leader could ignore the planet’s population burden.

“There were three billion people when Kevin Rudd was born,” Mr Brown said. “There are 6.8 billion now. There will be nine billion by mid-century. This population boom is not economic wisdom – it is a recipe for planetary exhaustion and great human tragedy.

“We need the wisdom to have economic growth with a steady-state population at most – this is the new commonsense.”