The draft guidelines released during a coastal councils’ conference on Wednesday shift the focus from beaches to estuaries, predicting homes close to waterways could suffer regular flooding because higher sea levels would stop water escaping.

However Greenwell Point resident Ron Vaughan said the prospects of floods was nothing new for the coastal village.

“Most people who live here know it’s a flood-prone area, only usually it comes from the paddocks and not the river,” said the retired engineer.

In fact Mr Vaughan said he had only ever seen the Crookhaven River burst its banks once during a long association with his waterfront property — and even then it was only on a small scale.

However he accepted climate change was a reality that would “probably creep up on people very slowly”.

Trying to limit the impact of the creeping change was the aim of the draft planning guidelines released on Wednesday by Planning Minister Kristina Keneally and Environment and Climate Change Minister John Robertson.

The NSW Coastal Planning Guideline: Adapting to Sea Level Rise, that provides direction to councils when preparing planning instruments for coastal areas and assessing development proposals along with the Coastal Risk Management Guide and Flood Risk Management Guide, which advise councils how to factor sea level rise benchmarks when calculating potential coastal hazard risks and flood risks, are now on display for public comment.

See Against the tide, page 4