When James Still – founder of Still Insured Insurance Brokers and the 2025 NIBA-Vero National Young Broker of the Year – walked into Bloomfield in Far North Queensland in September 2025, he did not find a community undone by the scale of a cyclone. He found one undone by a failure of flood risk communication – the same problem Suncorp Group is now spending $3 million in structured research to address.
Suncorp’s Future Ready Resilience Program, a three-year initiative stemming from the insurer’s commitment to the Queensland government following the 2024 sale of Suncorp Bank, has moved into active research phase. Suncorp chief risk officer Bridget Messer (pictured centre) recently convened a workshop bringing together the Queensland Reconstruction Authority (QRA), Natural Hazards Research Australia (NHRA), the University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, James Cook University, and The Lab Insight & Strategy to review progress across four research workstreams.
The program is running against a backdrop of almost $3.5 billion in insured losses from 264,000 claims across Australia in 2025, according to the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA). Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred generated more than $1.5 billion in losses from 132,000 claims, while the North Queensland floods produced $304 million across 11,700 claims. Queensland bore a disproportionate share of both figures.
Still visited Bloomfield – a small community in Far North Queensland still recovering from Tropical Cyclone Jasper’s 2023 floods – as part of Vero’s community engagement program. Around 10 residents were still living in caravans two years after the event. “Bloomfield was a once in a lifetime experience. I’d never walked into a town where people’s houses were simply gone,” Still said. The group heard accounts of water reaching 16 to 18 metres, and in some cases the only evidence of a home was a bare concrete slab. Many residents had either no cover at all or lacked flood cover that could respond to the event that actually hit them. When the water took their houses, it effectively wiped out their wealth.
The visit changed Still’s approach to client conversations permanently. “Coming out of this experience, flood [cover] is definitely going to be something I’ll recommend to everyone, because I wouldn’t want any of my clients to go through that, to lose everything,” he said. That is precisely the behaviour change Suncorp’s research aims to generate at scale – not through individual broker advocacy alone, but through structural changes to how insurers frame and communicate flood risk before events occur.
The Bloomfield experience reflects a documented national pattern. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s (APRA) Insurance Climate Vulnerability Assessment (Insurance CVA), published in March 2026, estimated that around one in seven Australian households are currently uninsured, with the protection gap projected to widen to one in four by 2050 under both climate scenarios modelled. New South Wales and Queensland together account for approximately 60% of uninsured homes nationally – a concentration the modelling projects will remain unchanged by 2050.
Affordability alone does not account for the full gap. The ICA estimates that 77% of homes facing severe to extreme flood risk do not have flood insurance today – an opt-out rate pointing to a comprehension problem, not purely a price sensitivity one. For brokers, clients who can afford flood cover but have opted out represent a qualitatively different advisory challenge from those who genuinely cannot afford it. Between 2010 and 2025, Australian home insurance premiums rose at an annual average rate of 7.2%, while wages grew at just 3.1% annually, according to APRA – a divergence compounding pressure at the affordability margin. But the 77% opt-out rate sits independently of that trend, and it is what Suncorp’s flood risk communication research stream is directly targeting.
The Future Ready Resilience Program does not operate in isolation from Suncorp’s broader public position on resilience and coverage access. In March 2026, Suncorp chief executive consumer insurance Lisa Harrison commented on the insurer’s support for the federal government’s Hazards Insurance Partnership Guiding Principles – a framework designed to direct resilience investment across the public and private sectors. “As a collective, we’re pushing for stronger, practical resilience measures that better protect communities, help families maintain their lifestyle, and ensure access to adequate and affordable home insurance,” Harrison said.
Suncorp also noted it was updating its digital platforms and policy systems to incorporate resilience data at scale. “We’re now working to improve the digital experience for our customers and investing in updating our policy system so it can recognise resilience at scale,” Harrison said. That policy system work runs parallel to the research program and points to where the research outputs are likely to land: not as academic findings alone, but as changes to how Suncorp prices, explains, and structures flood cover for the customers brokers place with it.
Of the four program workstreams, two carry the most direct operational relevance for intermediaries. The first examines how customers interpret flood risk information and whether insurers can deliver clearer communication to support informed cover decisions. If the research produces new communication frameworks, brokers will need to assess whether those frameworks alter the conversations they are currently having at renewal – particularly around flood definition distinctions and opt-out decisions.
The second explores post-disaster rebuild flexibility, including whether policyholders could be given greater options to rebuild to suit changed circumstances. That question is already live in North Queensland, where the Stronger Homes Grant Program for flood-affected homeowners has raised practical questions about how resilience grants interact with sums insured, how upgrades are treated within coverage decisions, and how resilience works are sequenced with insurance repairs.
The remaining two streams address wind-driven hail damage – including the vulnerability of roof-mounted solar panels – and year-round property risk reduction support for customers.
Following an insurance roundtable in Charleville in September 2025, the QRA led a working group that, in March 2026, transferred seven recently completed flood studies to the ICA for integration into the National Flood Information Database, with the aim of putting downward pressure on premiums in areas where risk has been overestimated. More accurate flood modelling means more defensible pricing – a direct consideration for brokers placing property risks in regional Queensland postcodes where premiums have been elevated by imprecise data.
Messer framed the Future Ready Resilience Program’s purpose in terms that extend beyond community outcomes into how the industry manages risk communication at scale. “This is an exciting program of work for Suncorp, which brings together many great minds to deepen our understanding of natural hazards and discover how we can play a greater role in helping our Queensland communities prepare and respond to them. As extreme weather becomes more frequent and more severe, the work being undertaken through the Future Ready Resilience Program will help strengthen our understanding of risk, support customers before, during, and after severe weather events, and work towards a more resilient Queensland,” she said.
The program also includes resilience training for Suncorp assessors and building panel representatives, delivered with Master Builders Queensland and cyclone, storm, and flood specialists.
