Bringing close: wildfire-based advocacy for climate action and socio-ecological transformation

Disaster diplomacy scholarship has predominantly examined how high-level state actors aim to reduce conflict in the Global South. This focus leaves underexplored the roles of non-state actors, socio-politicalally polarized contexts in the Global North, and the structural drivers of disaster risk. Addressing this gap, this article expands the conceptual scope of disaster diplomacy by integrating insights from informal disaster diplomacy and advocacy literatures. It examines how non-state actors mobilize large-scale wildfires as opportunities for advocacy toward “peace,” defined as harmonious human-nature relations. Informed by empirical vignettes from megafires in Australia (2019–2020), France (2022), Greece (2023), and the United States (2025), the article asks who these actors are and how they frame causes and impacts of megafires. Wildfires remain underexamined in sustainability and disaster scholarship, particularly their political dimensions. This stands in sharp contrast to the surge in wildfire-related media coverage this past decade. The analysis shows that diverse actors – including affected residents, journalists, and staff of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) – leverage megafires to advance climate action and, to a lesser extent, socio-ecological transformation. Given their capacity to evoke powerful emotions and imaginaries associated with forests, fire, and “burning world,” megafires have a distinctive ability to “bring close” the reality of climate change across time, space, and socio economic groups. Such advocacy often relies on problematic media biases that unevenly value disaster suffering and reduce complex wildfire drivers to climate change. Despite these risks, well-crafted wildfire advocacy can draw actors together around shared interests across North-South divides, echoing disaster-diplomacy practices and objectives.