Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has applied to register her name and that of the Fridays For Future movement she founded in 2018, which has gone global and catapulted her to international fame.

The move would allow the Swedish teenager to take legal action against people or companies that tried to use her name or the movement’s that are not in line with its values, she said.

“I assure you, I and the other school strikers have absolutely no interests in trademarks. But unfortunately it needs to be done,” she said on Instagram on Wednesday.

Ms Thunberg said she had also applied to trademark “Skolstrejk for klimatet”, school strike for the climate in Swedish – the wording on the placard she has held since she started her one-person protest outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, for which she missed school.

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A post shared by Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg)

“My name and the #FridaysForFuture movement are constantly being used for commercial purposes without any consent whatsoever,” she wrote on Instagram.

“It happens, for instance, in marketing, selling of products and people collecting money in my and the movement’s name.”

Ms Thunberg also said she and her family were setting up a nonprofit foundation to handle money from such things as book royalties, donations and prizes.

It will aim to “promote ecological, climatic and social sustainability as well as mental health,” she wrote.

Ms Thunberg, who took centre stage at the Global Economic Forum in Davos this month, and her fellow young activists in the movement want politicians to listen to climate scientists and take action to curb global warming.

-with AAP