Fusing passion and design, Climate Clubs is addressing sustainability with style.
- Samuel Mays
- May 4, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: May 9, 2023
Driving home from the hospital, Kyle Harman-Turner’s perspective of the world seems different. Humanity’s challenges no longer seem like alien concepts to him, instead, they are now problems that he needs to tackle to ensure that his newborn son, asleep in the car seat beside him, can grow up in the best version of the world possible.
With 20 years of experience in advertising and an undying love for the world’s most popular sport, Kyle sees an opportunity to fuse his passions and begin a campaign to address one of the world’s most pressing challenges. He will raise awareness for climate change and sustainability through football, “that’s when I created ‘Climate Clubs’ - when I was on paternity leave with my son.”
“Football has the power to change society for good,” Kyle tells me, “I think football can genuinely help to change people’s behaviours and sway the masses far more than governments can.”
Aware of the scale of his task, Kyle recalls the initial challenges that Climate Clubs had to overcome, “It started with trying to contact a lot of the clubs and get them directly involved.” But that wasn’t going to be easy.
“Football clubs inherently aren’t sustainable… there’s lots of travel involved, for example,” Kyle explains, “I think there’s lots of fear of looking hypocritical if they come out and communicate around that”.
So Climate Clubs pursued another path and in 2022, they launched a collection of redesigned football badges which were displayed on flags at the Royal Academy of Arts. “We very purposefully looked at badges that were iconic, like Nottingham Forest - very iconic - and a spread of messages, so we wanted to cover things like animals, so Hull, for example, with the tigers’ numbers dwindling.”
Climate Clubs’ message didn’t stop with just showcasing their designs. They sold 25 of each of their flags, to represent the 25% of clubs whose grounds are at risk of regular flooding by 2050. “Any flag that someone bought, the money went directly to that cause. So if you bought a Brentford bee one, your money directly helped to reintroduce bees.”
The response to the collection was greater than Kyle and the Climate Club team could ever have hoped for, “the last count we did, [we had] over 25 million media impressions, without any money spent. That shows that it’s resonating with football fans. We’ve had thousands of messages from young people asking to buy our flooded shirts, for example.”
Climate Clubs is now working with football clubs from up and down the UK, as well as up and down the football pyramid, “It’s not necessarily more important to focus on larger clubs, I work with Dulwich Hamlet, for example,” Kyle says, “but obviously the impact of big clubs getting involved, that’s where I think there’s a huge opportunity for behaviour change at a mass scale.”
Sustainability in football is not a topic that has gone entirely unnoticed until Climate Clubs came along, “clubs are on different parts of their journey,” Kyle explains, “the Premier League have just brought in a head of sustainability, so the legislation is coming. It’s just the clubs that get on top of it now can bring a generation of new fans with them, and the rest will be playing catch-up.”
There are clubs which are already leading the way in terms of sustainability, Kyle explained to me some of the ways that some clubs are working towards green football; Forest Green Rovers make their kits out of ground coffee beans, Crewe Alexander is building a solar panel farm, and Manchester City collects rainwater from their stadium roof and turns it into beer - although I think I’d pass on a pint of Etihad roof water personally.
Although the redesigned badges and kits have put Climate Clubs in the spotlight, their hope is to collaborate with clubs moving forward and work together on a more sustainable football industry.
“We deliberately left it open, we’re not just about doing those 10 or 15 badges, we wanted to use that as a tool to engage with the clubs.” Reading, whose ‘climate stripes’ kit for the 2022/23 season grabbed media attention, has commissioned a badge design from Climate Clubs.
Reading is a club that is ahead of the game in terms of making sustainable choices in football, but Kyle describes to me his ideal outcome from Climate Clubs, “imagine if all teams had climate kits, and all the money from that purchase went to helping that issue… I think it could have a really powerful and tangible impact.”
Recent changes to legislation around gambling and sponsorship in English football are viewed by Climate Clubs as a real opportunity for football clubs to progress in their sustainability campaigns. When speaking to Kyle, I found out that we’re both West Ham fans, and I told him how I fell in love with their recent project which used the hammers and eco-friendly clothing brand ‘Patagonia’ as an example of potential green sponsorship deals in football, stressing to him that I need him to get that deal to come to fruition.
“Yeah I’m a West Ham fan too, I’m a season ticket holder, so hopefully!” Kyle joked with me, “Imagine if the club took it as an opportunity to lead and say actually ‘we’re going into green sponsorship’ as an announcement of leading in this area.”
The future for Climate Clubs looks promising, with goals to expand beyond clubs in the UK, as well as exploring sustainability in clubs beyond football, as can be seen with their latest design, ‘Miami Heating’.
But Kyle explained to me that, for now, the focus is on addressing climate change in a more cultural way.
“I think we need to get over - just in general, in society - get over the idea of people doing things perfectly. You know, I’m passionate about this area, but I’m not perfect at it - at all. We need millions of people doing things imperfectly, making those changes imperfectly, rather than a few doing them perfectly.”
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