The time has well past for talk on climate change and sustainability best practice.

Neither is a theory or a possibility. They are realities that have to be faced and strived for.

It is easy for our focus to drift off message, particularly now that the economy has grabbed 100 per cent of the headlines.

But without climate change adaptation and a commitment to find new ways of doing things so that we are less wasteful of the world's natural resources and less damaging in our footprint, our financial futures will be very limited and doomed to fragility.

In fact the path to economic recovery must be forged on the pillars of a new green economy, where the real cost of doing business in a wasteful and unsustainable manner is tested in a meaningful way against new approaches and technologies.

It is simply foolish to think that we will all wake up one morning soon to news reports that the stimulus packages being rolled out across the globe have miraculously righted the ship and we can go back to business as usual.

At every level we need to be looking at how we live our own lives, how we create wealth and what role governments are playing to develop relevant policies that encourage innovation and business that services the transition to sustainable change.

Here on the Sunshine Coast there is a powerful, underlying support for change to ensure that paramount lifestyle values are retained.

But to do that we have to move away from an economy heavily dependent on construction and real estate to one that is more balanced and less vulnerable to that sector's peaks and troughs.

Put simply if the major call for trade skills and employment continues to come from construction the inevitable result can only be exponential growth and a future not dissimilar to what we see now on the Gold Coast.

Council's goal to make us a national model for regional sustainability is one that throws up many challenges but which also glistens with opportunity.

The biggest challenge however remains its capacity to change its own way of thinking and doing business.

Last week's example of a recommendation to upgrade seven sewage treatment plants at a cost of $215 million without any cost benefit analysis of the replacement of leaky pipes servings those plants is one case in point.

The upgrade solution was not tested in any thorough and formal way against the capacity for beneficial re use to dramatically reduce the demand on those plants nor either the amount of energy required to pump effluent to those plants or the increased and ongoing disposal of treated effluent into our waterways.

Sustainability should not allow river disposal as an option. Sustainability should require that every project of council is tested against its capacity to deliver job transition to new green industry.

There is a real opportunity for the Sunshine Coast to build a new economy around green industry and sustainability best practice but that can't happen when the organisation charged with driving change so easily accepts business as usual from a bureaucracy that is clearly not getting the message.

Words are no longer enough.

Equally the slowing world economy and the demise of the deal to redevelop Horton Park Golf Club should have given pause to seriously question the location of the region's principal activity centre on some of the lowest land on the Sunshine Coast.

However in recent weeks councillors have travelled extensively around the country looking at different models of development, the issue of where it is going to be put shelved as already decided by the state government and beyond debate.

Yet what is being planned for that low lying, floodplain location is the financial heart of the region for the next 100 years.

And it is being planned at a time when we are being warned that within that time frame conditions will reach the point that a metre sea level rise coupled with a three metre storm surge is a real possibility.

This is simply folly that may serve the interests of a few, but which exposes the community to unacceptable risk.

Equally the politically motivated decision by the state government to build the new regional hospital at Kawana, an area that is particularly vulnerable to inundation both from the sea to the east and river to the west, also ignores those realities.

At all levels be that in our own homes or in the corridors of government our behaviours and our decisions continue to ignore the future to all of our peril.