Pope starts climate conversation with stripes inspiration

Climate stripes graphics created at the University of Reading have helped Pope Francis to start a conversation about our rapidly warming world.

The Pope called for a united front in the fight against climate change after bosses from la Repubblica, one of Italy’s leading news outlets, presented him with a climate stripes scarf and a copy of today’s newspaper, which features the climate stripes across its front page.

The gifts were presented to the Pope at The Vatican on World Environment Day (Monday, 5 June). Marking the occasion, he said: “The phenomenon of climate change insistently reminds us of our responsibilities: it particularly affects the poorest and most fragile, those who have contributed least to its evolution. It is first a question of justice and then of solidarity.

“Climate change also brings us back to basing our actions on responsible cooperation on the part of everyone: our world is now too interdependent and cannot afford to be divided into blocks of countries that promote their interests in an isolated or unsustainable way.”

Global stripes

The stripes were created by Professor Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading. They show the increase in global average temperature for each year from 1850 to 2022, relative to the average temperature over the period as a whole. Blue stripes represent cooler-than-average years, and red stripes indicate hotter-than-average years.

Since their creation in 2017, more than one million stripes graphics have been downloaded from over 180 countries via the ShowYourStripes website.

Professor Ed Hawkins said: “We’ve seen the stripes appear all over the world, including at music festivals, fashion shows and on football shirts. I could never have imagined the stripes would be shared so far and wide, reaching people who might never normally come into contact with climate science.

“Pope Francis will have introduced the climate emergency to another large part of society.

I hope that the many people who saw him with the stripes will be inspired to start talking about the rapid warming of our planet and what we need to do to stop it.”