The impact of climate change in Australia is becoming difficult to ignore, with leaked information from a government report due to be released in the coming month describing the risks from future climate changes in the country as “intense and scary”.

To Mim Haysom, executive general manager for brand and customer experience at insurance firm Suncorp Group, these findings are likely of little surprise. Speaking at the recent Cannes Lions festival, Haysom gave an example of events in the New South Wales city of Lismore, which has experienced a “one in 100 years weather event” three times in the past five years.

“So that is the severity and the frequency that we’re seeing coming through in weather events,” explained Haysom. “If we keep going on the trajectory that we’re currently on, the data is telling us that by about 2035, 10% of Australian homes could be uninsurable. And that for us is a completely unacceptable situation because the economic and social impacts of uninsured communities can be quite severe and quite tragic.”

Haysom and Suncorp have been addressing how insurers should respond to this crisis for the past five years, in partnership with ad agency Leo Australia. “We saw a really big opportunity to flip our strategy on its head and to go absolutely against the industry norm,” says Haysom. “We decided not to talk about what we do after an event and start focusing on what we could do before these events come. We shifted from a strategy of recovery to one of resilience.”