Public planning for sustainability implies a forward-looking approach that often includes imagining future harm and taking steps to prevent that future harm before it occurs. A major challenge to implementing such forward looking, or precautionary, a policy instrument is managing the impacts such policies have on existing expectations. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of risk perception in the development of forward-looking policy instruments. A case study example focused on coastal flood insurance in the USA is presented to highlight the difficulty of implementing sustainable policy goals when current policies incentivise the discounting of risk. The goal is to highlight factors of current policy expressions, like the discounting of risk, that inhibit the development and implementation of sustainable policy instruments.