The Towards 2050: Shaping Cairns Growth Strategy (the Growth Strategy) is a long-range, community-informed initiative that establishes strong foundations and comprehensive strategies for managing future growth and development of Cairns.

It serves as a roadmap for the next 25 years, informed by insights from the past and present to guide the city’s evolution and support continued prosperity.

An additional 72,000 people are likely to call Cairns home by 2050. The key role of the Growth Strategy is to identify how Cairns will accommodate this growing population and the city’s diversifying economic potential in a sustainable way, which protects what the community and visitors love about Cairns.

The Growth Strategy establishes the foundations for Cairns' long-term planning and will guide future policy development and decision-making by Council.

For millennia, First Peoples have embodied the responsibility to care for Country, caring for the lands, waters and skies of the region with future generations in mind. The Growth Strategy recognises and honours this wisdom and endeavours to reflect a care-taking approach in managing growth and working towards environmental sustainability, positive social impact and considered planning outcomes.

It has been developed through a multi-phased process (from August 2022 to September 2025), with extensive community engagement to capture diverse perspectives on Cairns' future. These insights, together with the background data and analysis provided by various background studies, informed a directions paper (released in mid-2024), which explored potential growth scenarios for Cairns leading up to 2050. Engagement on that directions paper provided important feedback to help shape this document.

The Towards 2050 Growth Strategy was formally adopted by Cairns Regional Council on 17 September 2025.

The Towards 2050 Growth Strategy is a long-range, community-informed initiative that establishes strong foundations and comprehensive strategies for managing future growth and development of Cairns. It serves as a roadmap for the next 25 years, informed by insights from the past and present to guide the city’s evolution and support continued prosperity.

It will:

• Shape a prosperous, resilient and sustainable future for the Cairns local government area (LGA).
• Promote, protect and enhance our iconic natural environment now and for generations to come.
• Create safe, sustainable and connected places that support a quality life.
• Ensure the community adapts to the inevitable changes in how we live and interact with our places, spaces and environment.
• Provide for a range of housing and employment supported by essential infrastructure, services and facilities that meets the future needs of the Cairns LGA.
• Comprehensively engage with and be informed by the Cairns community.
• Represent best practice, contemporary and progressive planning and growth management in a manner that directly responds to the unique environment, including needs and challenges of the Cairns LGA.
• Provide the foundation and necessary data inputs for Council’s new planning scheme and other growth-related initiatives being delivered by Council.