The University of Reading’s ‘climate stripes’ campaign will be supported by two English football teams as the new season kicks off.

Forest Green Rovers FC and Reading FC will wear the climate stripes, created by Professor Ed Hawkins in 2018, to highlight the need for action on global warming.

The design is a series of vertical-coloured bars, from blue to red, to show the progressive heating of the planet since 1850.

Each stripe represents the average temperature for a single year, with shades of blue indicating cooler-than-average years and red showing hotter-than-average years.

Forest Green Rovers FC has been recognised by FIFA as the greenest football club in the world – set to continue as they don the stripes in the upcoming 2024/25 football league season.

Dale Vince, Chairman of Forest Green Rovers said: “We’ve taken big strides to bring sustainability into every facet of what we do as a club. Continuing to find ways to raise awareness of the climate crisis is in our DNA and we’re chuffed to join the #showyourstripes campaign.”

More than a million people downloaded the graphics from the site within a week of it’s launch in 2019, with television weather presenters, scientists and campaigners sharing them on social media under the hashtag #showyourstripes.

Reading FC has retained the climate stripes on their home and away shirts after first including them on kits for the 2022/23 season.

Creator of the campaign Professor Ed Hawkins added: “Football unites people, and now it can unite fans in the fight against climate change.”