The climate activist Greta Thunberg has said she 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 legal action against persons or companies trying to use her name which are not in line with her values or that of her movement, 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.

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 protest outside the Swedish parliament in 2018.

“My name and the #FridaysForFuture movement are constantly being used for commercial purposes without any consent whatsoever. It happens for instance in marketing, selling of products and people collecting money in my and the movement’s name,” she wrote on the social network.

Thunberg, who took centre stage at the World 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 tackle global heating.