Climate activists are targeting the role of insurance companies in the expansion of fossil fuel production, highlighting the impact of extreme weather events on their bottom line.

“We’ve already targeted banks and super funds, so insurance companies are the next frontier,” said Dan Gocher from the financial activist group Market Forces.

On Monday it hijacked the insurer QBE’s branding in Sydney, plastering the slogan “Made possible by QBE” over images of coalmines and natural disasters.

At about 8am on Monday morning the Market Forces team hung the posters from the QBE headquarters in Sydney’s CBD. Julien Vincent, executive director of Market Forces said they were removed by security after about 10 minutes.

“It’s about highlighting their role in the perpetuation and expansion of the fossil fuel industry, which is contributing to climate change,” said Gocher, who worked for QBE until 2015. “Because as their slogan tells you, they make it possible.”

The activists’ imagery is very similar to one produced by QBE a few years ago. In 2012 the its annual report printed “Made possible by QBE” on the cover, over an image of an operating coalmine.

In that report, the company boasted it was “a major insurer of the mining sector in Australia” and insured “coalminers in the Queensland Bowen Basin and New South Wales Hunter Valley”.

Finding out exactly how much insurers were underwriting coal and other fossil fuel projects was difficult, Vincent said.

“The way you learn about it is when there’s been a disaster,” he said.

When the world’s largest oil leak occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, it was revealed BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil extraction was insured by QBE.

Gocher said the group would target other insurers, but QBE was an obvious place to start because it had revealed some of its involvement in the sector.

Insurers also held large investment portfolios, Gocher said. Australian insurance companies managed about $200bn worth of stock, $35bn of it held by QBE.

Some other insurers have begun to move away from fossil fuels. The French insurer AXA and Germany’s Allianz divested from thermal coal because of climate change.

Overseas insurers and reinsurers (companies that insure other insurance companies) have played a significant role in public discussion of climate change after recognising they were particularly exposed to the effects of extreme weather events.

In 2015 Muich RE said: “We are convinced that there are particular regions and hazards where climate change is already having a definite influence on losses. Significant effects have to be accounted for in risk management approaches of the insurance industry.”

But despite being hit with large payouts, Australian insurers lagged behind their foreign counterparts, not divesting from fossil fuels and not playing a role in the public discussion, Gocher said.

Annual reports show QBE paid US$76m for storms that battered the New South Wales coast in 2014; US$144m for storms Desmond, Eva and Frank in the UK in 2015; US$108m for cyclone Pam, which hit Vanuatu in March.

Market Forces has asked Australian insurers to divest from fossil fuel in their investment portfolios, begin withdrawing from underwriting fossil fuel companies and play a role in the public conversation about climate change.

Gocher said withdrawal from underwriting could not be done overnight, but companies could immediately cease underwriting new projects.

Guardian Australia has approached QBE for response.