Incidental Allegory in News Coverage of the COP30 Pavilion Fire

Abstract

This essay applies close textual analysis to news reports covering the 20 November 2025 fire at the United Nations COP30 meeting in Belém, Brazil, to demonstrate how allegory can manifest in journalistic reporting of real-world events. It argues that allegory can, intentionally or unintentionally, occur in reports given specific circumstances, existing themes in the journalistic record, and other contexts. Analysis identifies and demonstrates the recurrence of two prominent allegorical themes across reports of the COP30 fire: one attending to victims, harm, and panic and another attending to disruption and failure. Discussion highlights how such incidental allegory—different from deliberately crafted or fully accidental allegory—guides audiences to conceptualize literal events within a web of literary and conceptual contexts and, thus, holds the capacity to frame understandings and future discourse related to climate action.

1. Introduction

Allegory and metaphor are common elements in poetry and fiction and are not associated with strict non-fiction or breaking news reports. Yet, sometimes, the allegorical elements of real-world events—the similarities and resonances between one actual event and another—are so readily apparent that comparisons manifest naturally for both reporters and audiences, with or without intention. An actual, literal event can resemble or echo other events so closely that the press reports may read like crafted allegory.

This is exactly what happened on 20 November 2025, when a fire broke out among the pavilions of the Blue Zone at COP30, the 30th session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Belém, Brazil. At roughly 2:15 p.m., flames and smoke appeared, climbing the canvas-lined walls of several exhibit stations, and attendees fled the area. Within minutes, UN security and fire department personnel had responded to and contained the fire. Thirteen people were treated for smoke inhalation, and conference events for the remainder of the afternoon were postponed and canceled. The brief incident took place on the second-to-last scheduled day of the conference, where representatives from participant nations had gathered to negotiate global action to mitigate climate change for a high-profile thirtieth consecutive year.

The remarkable if minor event made immediate headlines, as reporters already onsite to cover COP negotiations used social and digital media to alert the world to the momentary calamity in, essentially, real time. And here, in the heat of the moment, allegory for broader climate and climate action themes was palpably apparent, with poetic cues and resonance to other themes in the climate action conversation, as if crafted intentionally by a creative author: here, at the mouths of the Amazon basin, where massive wildfires in the world’s largest arboreal carbon sink had gained global attention and concern just years earlier, a fire was erupting and disrupting a climate change conference; here, at a convention that had garnered criticism for its inability to act and achieve consensus while vulnerable communities suffer from climate impacts, the negotiations were halted while emergency responders tended to injured victims; and here, at the epicenter of the world’s climate response talks, there were “panic” and a “house on fire,” just as climate activist Greta Thunberg had spoken of in widely circulated comments, repeated in climate reporting and blogging since 2019.

Journalists responding to the event may have simply reported the facts as they happened. Others may have leaned into the poetic cues and subtle resonances they had with these other climate themes and discourse. Either way, the allegories were available to audiences following climate news and negotiations over the past several years, inviting allegorical reflection on both the fire itself and the COP meetings broadly. As the United Nations entered its fourth decade of policy deliberation for collective responses to climate change, global surface temperatures were already exceeding the COP-established target limits and the United States had already withdrawn from further participation; the reports of the conference proceedings would influence sentiments toward and confidence in the COP project going forward. The fire was a metaphor for an endeavor in crisis, now codified in news coverage of the COP.

This essay considers reports on the COP30 pavilion fire as a case study to argue that allegory can, intentionally or unintentionally, manifest in journalistic reporting given specific circumstances, existing themes in the journalistic record, and other contexts and that this allegory colors the social narrative of literal phenomena and real-world events. As part of this Special Issue examining the role of media and journalism in shaping ecological action and stewardship, it highlights how such incidental allegory—different from deliberately crafted or fully accidental allegory—guides audiences to conceptualize literal events within a web of literary and conceptual contexts, and, thus, holds the capacity to frame understandings and future discourse related to climate action. It poses and responds to a simple research question: How did press reports of the fire rhetorically allude to other major themes in existing climate change and climate policy discourse at the time, and how is this rhetorical allusion traceable in the text of the reports themselves?

In the following pages, I first provide a conceptual discussion of incidental allegory and explain how close textual rhetorical analysis in context allows for tracing of incidental allegory in action. I then provide a context for the pavilion fire reports and the major discursive themes preceding and framing them, before conducting an extended close textual analysis of a sample of the reports themselves. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this case, arguing that even if such analysis is not often applied to journalistic reports, incidental allegory is a significant element of journalism’s influence on environmental policy and discourse.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Incidental Allegory and Rhetorical Analysis

Literary and media critics frequently apply allegorical analysis to works of fiction and creative non-fiction but not, usually, to works of strict non-fiction and objective, short-form reporting, like that found in breaking news press reports. After all, allegory is symbolic representation, in which one thing stands for, represents, or alludes to another, making it seemingly irrelevant to literal or objective reports intended to describe physical events and realities. Allegory in fiction or poetry or other creative forms—from Aesop’s Fables to Animal Farm to Hollywood films like Don’t Look Up and Get Out—can be intentional, unintentional, or a mix of both, providing rich opportunities to analyze, interpret, and discuss inherent commentary artistically and, often, playfully conveyed, both in and out of context. Real-world events, though, are phenomena, and press reports identify and describe the thing in itself; we would not generally expect objective data to display art, commentary, or metaphor.

In formal allegorical analysis, the audience or critic attends to metaphor, parallelism, word choice, homophones, allusion to other works, and more to identify where and how one text makes reference to or commentary upon another—or, alternatively, to an event or concept in the world. Sometimes, the allegory identified by the critic is deliberately crafted or explicitly acknowledged; we might call this intentional allegory, and it functions well in satire, social commentary, or religious/philosophical instruction, meant to comment on or recontextualize complex subjects or topics upon which commentators might otherwise be dissuaded from discussing directly or in literal terms. Other times, the allegory is not intended but becomes apparent to the audience or critic anyhow, perhaps because the original text is interpreted in a novel context—such as when a work of art created years or decades ago functions as allegory for current-day events; we might call this accidental allegory. Among these forms, thematic allegory is more abstract and, seemingly, less applicable still to journalistic reports, as it implies the existence of a recurrent or extended theme within a text, in which narrative or descriptive elements correspond to and potentially comment upon external concepts or situations.

The form of allegory emerging from contextual coincidence in news report events is something distinct from all of these.

I term this other form incidental allegory; it is a form of allegory that does not rely on intentionality but may not be fully accidental in its allusion to related discourse and events. It is allegory in a report of literal facts (not creative ones) that, nonetheless, incidentally manifests due to context and position within an ongoing discourse. Certainly, some journalists strive for strict objectivity while others embrace editorializing, creative, and ideologically woven elements, but incidental allegory can manifest in press reports of either kind, as the allegory takes form through its context and position within ongoing conversations; without the immediate, incidental contexts and ongoing conversations, the allegory would not be apparent.

For example, we might think of reports on the 11 September 2011, al-Qaeda terror attacks in the United States that referred to the events, synecdochally, as “9/11.” There is no evidence that the date of the attacks was intended to correspond with the emergency response code “911” used in the United States phone system, but reporting on and making reference to the event with the numerical vocabulary (instead of, say, “November 11” or “the 2001 al-Qaeda hijacking attacks”) manifests an incidental allegory, as “911” alludes to emergency conditions and first responders, like firefighters. The emergency conditions of the attacks and the particular prominence of the New York City Fire Department among its victims give the numbers 911 and 9/11 a special, incidental allegorical resonance that invites literary analysis thereafter.

Another, more recent example is the incidental allegory arising from the coincidence of extreme weather conditions and the Operation Metro Surge activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2026. As ICE agents conducted the operation with aggressive tactics that ultimately resulted in the killing of two U.S. citizens, many residents of the area expressed anxiety and some created community warning systems urging neighbors to beware of ICE and avoid (or even resist) their activities. Then, when extreme cold hit the Minneapolis region and other parts of the U.S., warnings to “watch out for ice” or “keep off the roads if you see ice” functioned as incidental allegory for the ICE operations and resistance movements. The mere presence of the weather event incidentally referenced ICE operations, and social media comments called attention, explicitly and implicitly, to the homophonic resonance between “ice” and “ICE.” In this case, the incidental allegory allowed social media reports and posts about a literal event to encourage sentiments and associations in the public discourse.

Incidental allegory in news reporting starts with literal realities, but the act of reporting itself becomes open to literary analysis for thematic allegory all the same. In short, news media and news coverage trip upon the incidental allegory by circumstance, and that circumstance manifests the allegory due to context. Words used to report realities may act as homophones, allusions, metaphors, or referents to other events and contexts in public attention. At that point, the journalist may still strive for objectivity, avoiding the impulse to editorialize or infuse literary play with word choices and allusions, or they may lean into the allegory, intentionally or unintentionally using words, details, and structures that extend the associations. Either way, the occurrence of the incidental allegory can then highlight and stoke sentiments that the audience already senses—and, when policy decisions hinge on public sentiments and confidence, the incidental presence and spread of such allegory can tip the scales of future action.

An appropriate method for tracking such allegory and answering the research question of how press reports of the COP30 fire rhetorically allude to other major themes in existing climate discourse is simple close textual analysis in context: rhetorical criticism that applies close attention to the words and phrases used in social-political context to reveal potential meanings and allusions, explicit and implicit, at play in the text. It is a simple matter of tracking and identifying how the word selections in a report encourage interpretations, associations, and sentiments.

Conceptually, such analysis thus draws on the rhetorical criticism work popularized by Burke (1966), wherein all language and symbolism hold referential potential, and all word choices are rhetorically potent, directing attention toward one thing or perspective and, inherently, away from others. Incidental allegory circulated in news reporting, thus, works enthymematically, as the connection between this thing and that—between 911 and 9/11, between ice and ICE, or between the COP30 fire and climate crises—is not explicitly stated but available for audiences to construct or complete for themselves, given rhetorical cues with readily available paths of association. Farrell (1976) writes on the powerful and socially suasive nature of such enthymematic rhetorics, arguing that it encourages the classical rhetorical concept of “doxa” or “common sense” among the audience public; that is, Farrell argues, rhetoric that does not simply assert its arguments to an audience but, rather, invites them to complete associations and inferences for themselves through subtle cues, encouraging doxa as a shared public act, whereby “common sense” is the result of common sensation or consensus (or, con-sentia, literally thinking together) for multiple individuals across time and distance. Farrell argues that, in this way, rhetoric is not merely the application of truths but, rather, the development of truths in a social arena. Through the exchange of concepts and symbols, individuals create agreed-upon meanings: what Farrell calls “social knowledge,” comprising “conceptions of symbolic relationships among problems, persons, interests, and actions, which imply (when accepted) certain notions of preferable public behavior” (p. 142).

In this way, the poetic cues, subtle resonances, and moments of dissonance in news reports with incidental allegory can encourage audiences to develop impressions and opinions about the phenomenological events that the reports recount. The journalist who writes the report need not intend to promote doxa—and indeed, even if they do embrace and emphasize the allegory with literary choices, they can retain plausible deniability regarding bias or editorializing if they merely stick to the literal facts; either way, the audience can still interpret and circulate the report and, if the allegory-laden report allows for enthymematic interpretations, the audience is likely to seize upon those interpretations and use them to further articulate doxa. This is all the more likely in a social media age, wherein media audiences may forward, repost, respond to, and comment upon news reports. Those reports that incidentally reflect or support prevalent social truths (doxa) are more likely to be embraced and circulated. The allegory need not be explicit, but if it is blunt enough, the public audience is likely to identify and respond to it, especially if framed through enthymeme.

I apply close textual analysis to reports of the COP30 fire in its immediate aftermath to identify the literary, allegorical, and enthymematic elements they contain. Such analysis, informed by Burke and Farrell, attends to how the words, symbols, and other structures at play in a text guide attention to some qualities and away from others, coding or “framing” subjects through perspectival lenses and approaches and influencing how the ensuing public conversation plays out. I also attend broadly to any and all linguistic details in the text (i.e., specific words and syntax, repetition, poetic flourish, structure, allusion to other texts and intertextuality) to identify major themes. This can also include analysis of implications from notable omissions in the text.

In identifying and analyzing themes and linguistic elements, I attend especially to their context at COP30, in Brazil, at the specific historical moment for environmental news, discourse, and action in the year 2025.

2.2. Discursive Context for Reports of the COP30 Fire

The United Nations Climate Change Conferences, held annually since 1995, are the formal meetings (or “conference of the parties,” i.e., “COP”) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992). Held in a different host location each year, they serve as the primary UN negotiating space for international policy response to climate change. The UNFCCC initially functioned to develop and implement the Kyoto Protocol, committing “industrialized countries and economies in transition to limit and reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in accordance with agreed individual targets” (Kyoto protocol, 1997), but has gradually expanded in scope and scale over three decades. Notably, this expansion included negotiation of the Paris Agreement (Paris agreement, 2016), signed in 2016, that set the shared goal to limit global surface temperature rise below 2 °C (3.6 °F) while also developing mechanisms for adapting to climate change and financing both climate-related mitigation/development and loss/damage expenses. The expansion also includes growth of the Blue Zone and Green Zone exhibitor spaces surrounding the COP negotiations themselves, where nations and other participants—and, increasingly, private NGO, industrial, academic, and non-profit representatives—can share their own data, initiatives, and perspectives on climate topics, in an arena equally open to networking, collaborating, advertising, sanctioned protest/demonstration, leisure, and, occasionally, greenwashing propaganda. The Blue Zone is managed directly by the UN and is access-restricted to officially registered and accredited COP participants and observers, while the Green Zone, managed by the host nation, is open to the public.

The expansion of the Blue and Green Zones has increased global media awareness of (and participation at) recent COP events, especially with social media reporters and influencers in attendance, allowing real-time coverage and daily posts on events in and around the UNFCCC negotiations themselves. COP28, held in late 2023 in Dubai, boasted “some 85,000 participants” with 366 side events (UNFCCC, 2023). COP30, despite being hosted in the Global South, attracted 56,118 participants (UNFCCC, 2025).

Yet, in spite of—and, in some ways, because of—this growth, the COP meetings have garnered increasing criticism. The Blue Zone and, especially, Green Zone activities begin to resemble a carnival and space for national and NGO self-promotion rather than a space for policy development and negotiation. Chaplain (2025), for instance, an environmental communication scholar and frequent COP attendee, argues that the massive size of recent COP meetings—along with access and registration restrictions; visa and travel costs; and Western-modeled, jargon-filled structural formats—make the events dizzying and inaccessible to attendees. Building directly from Walker (2007), Ångman (2013), Raphael (2019), and Mar et al. (2021), Chaplain argues that COP meetings need to better embrace climate justice and just communication practices, attending to scale, transparency, accountability, and plurality of cultural perspectives.

Other critiques (Schiemeier, 2012; Igini, 2025; Lo, 2025) have noted that even as scale and Blue Zone/Green Zone participation have increased, outcomes for the UNFCCC itself have stalled, as nations have already blown past initial global surface temperature goals, as the Paris Agreement lacks formal mechanisms for holding nations to their pledges, and as the United States, a major signatory and emitter, withdrew from the agreement (in 2020, and, then, again, in 2026); in fact, the USA, for the first time, sent no formal representatives to the conference in 2025.

While conferences grow in scale, seemingly less is achieved through annual negotiations in recent years—and, notably, negotiated action toward reduction in fossil fuel emissions at COP meetings has decreased as fossil fuel industry participation and influence at the meetings has increased. A major critique of COP30 was that its final agreements made no mention of fossil fuels, leading to accusations of “failure” and “farce” (Igini, 2025). Allegations about the fossil fuel industry’s influence on COP proceedings have risen over recent years, as host privileges were granted in succession to nations with major fossil fuel industries: Egypt in 2022, the United Arab Emirates in 2023, and Azerbaijan in 2024. At COP30, an estimated 1600 participants—roughly one in every 25 attendees—represented fossil fuel industries (Igini, 2025), and lobbyists “received two thirds more passes to COP30 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate vulnerable nations combined” (Igini, 2025). At the same time, other investigations reveal that while tens of thousands attended the 2025 conference, “just 7,527 of them were there with official government lanyards,” the lowest number since 2015 and down roughly 50% from 2024, meaning that as fossil fuel and other party participation has grown, participation from actual government delegates has sharply decreased (Lo, 2025).

Thus, in environmental and climate journalism, a thematic vein of skepticism and even cynicism has arisen in COP reporting. While, like Chaplain (2025), many environmental journalists remain hopeful for the potential of the UNFCCC to make meaningful change, there is also a sense that the COP itself has changed purposes, from a space of concerted negotiation to an epideictic space of private interests, greenwashing, and tourism promotion for the rotating host nations. The COPs are not, in fact, merely deliberative spaces, but, as Szerszynski (2007) suggests, in a “post-ecological” era, they have also become a kind of illusion or simulacra of actual climate negotiation, “self-referential” and “detached from any obligation to material referents or effects” (p. 338). The COPs, in their current state, can seem more about display and demonstration of ecological commitments than actual deliberation or action taken toward achieving those commitments. This lends the meetings a “situational irony” that damages their deliberative and policy-making potential; as Szerszynski writes, when the “understanding of a situation possessed by one or more actors acting within that situation is in dramatic tension with the reality of it as perceived by an outside observer” (p. 341), it is difficult to get things done. And, as Rickards (2020) notes, building on Szerszynski, if such events are not critiqued and called out, “worsening environmental troubles only fuel circular discussions, technocratic responses and justification of their ongoing amplification” (p. 126). The “performance of seriousness,” she writes, “ratchets up and freeze-frames environmental distress” (p. 126). It is imperative on environmental journalists, critics, and commentators to point out “simulation politics and greenwash of the sort that abounds in the post-truth era, exposing it as a calculated attempt to appear to ‘do something,’ while actually doing nothing, or worse.” (p. 134).

It was within the thematic frame of this discourse that COP30 took place, running from 10 November through 21 November 2025. Environmental news reporting on the event was infused with a combination of hope, urgency, and skepticism. The inherent contradictions of flying tens of thousands of participants around the globe to ostensibly combat climate change, or of constructing highways and infrastructure in the Amazon rainforest for the one-time event, were readily discussed in the press and online (see, for example, Wells, 2025; indeed, deforesting portions of the Amazon to make space for climate negotiations could, itself, function as a cynical implicit allegory). Over 2300 accredited journalists attended COP30, using the event’s 24 h Media Center (COP30, 2025a), while informal bloggers and influencers reported via social media from the Blue and Green Zones and others followed and reported on the events from afar.

When flames suddenly appeared among the Blue Zone pavilions on 20 November, news spread quickly online and worldwide, both to those who regularly follow environment/climate news and to a general audience. While innumerable events and interactions took place at COP30, this small incident—which, again, began and concluded in under six minutes—garnered widespread media attention, likely due to its unusual nature.

While not every event readily functions as a symbolic referent to other events, ideas, or discourse, I argue that there are at least three other significant discursive contexts that guided public interpretation of the COP30 fire reports—especially for those who had followed other climate reporting media in recent years.

First, it is worth noting that amid general skepticism and cynicism regarding COP meetings and outcomes, recent reports and commentary have increasingly attended to failures at the UNFCCC. In a 25 October interview in the weeks before COP30 opened, UN Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged the UNFCCC’s “failure” to avoid “overshooting” the 1.5 °C Celsius rise in global surface temperatures “tipping point” they had sought to avoid (Watts & Xipai, 2025). Touted victories of recent COP meetings, like COP28, focused on response and resilience efforts, like the implementation of a loss and damage fund to support victims of climate change (UNFCCC, 2025), rather than mitigation and prevention efforts towards limiting and reducing emissions, as intended in the Kyoto Protocol. The COP30 “stocktake” had, for the first time, highlighted where and how the UNFCCC had failed to implement its own initiatives and achieve goals set in the Paris Agreement. And, in late 2025, the departure of the United States from the Paris Agreement and absence from the COP30 attendees’ list was also palpable. In the months before COP30, there was high thematic awareness of UNFCCC’s failures and shortcomings, as if climate change had become an inevitable disaster to which the UN could respond but not entirely prevent.

Second, the host location for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, had been proposed in 2022 at COP27, just years after massive wildfires in the Amazon rainforest garnered international attention and concern. The fires in 2019 had consumed 3500 square miles of the rainforest, mostly in Brazil, and sparked international tensions when Brazil’s then-President, Jair Bolsonaro, rejected offers of financial and firefighting aid from the G-7 (CBS News, 2019). A briefing by the European Parliamentary Research Service, commissioned for the European Union (Ramírez, 2019), referred to the Amazon rainforest as the “lungs of the world,” and recommended the EU halt the EU–Mercosur free trade agreement to pressure Bolsonaro and Brazil to take greater action against the fires, straining diplomatic relations in a publicly visible manner. This story and images from the fires circulated on mainstream and digital/social media, making for a readily available and recent association between the Amazon basin and fire in the public imagination. Wildfires again plagued the region in 2020 and 2024.

Thirdly, in the years prior to COP30, a connection between the global climate crisis, “fire,” and “panic” had been well established by one of the most prominent global figures in climate media, Greta Thunberg (Cunningham & Crandall, 2022). Thunberg—who inspired the Fridays for Future climate strike movement at age 15—rose to global prominence after speaking at the 2019 meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland. In that address, Thunberg (2019) began by stating, “Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire,” and ended her six-minute remarks urging those in attendance to take meaningful climate action by returning to the theme, stating, “Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.” Video of the address was forwarded widely online, and Thunberg repeated the “house on fire” metaphor in several following speeches. The refrain was repeated and forwarded online by journalists and social media posters, manifesting, eventually, as memes (Murphy, 2021; Fiadotava, 2023). Her remarks excoriated bureaucrats and technocrats slow to take radical action against climate change, allowing benchmarks and tipping points to pass while applying slow, diplomatic negotiations to reach economically preferable solutions. The prominence was enough to prompt Bolsonaro, that year, to refer to Thunberg as “pirralha” (Portuguese for “bratty little girl”; Phillips, 2019). In 2020, Thunberg returned to the WEF and returned to the theme, arguing again that her audience should “panic” because “Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour” (Thunberg, 2020).

All of this means that when a fire broke out in the midst of COP30, postponing final negotiation sessions, the existing discursive context made allusion and allegory to the emergency/disaster of climate change, UNFCCC’s past failures and delays, and climate urgency/panic readily available for enthymemic association in a wide public audience.

To demonstrate how this incidental allegory manifests in the rhetoric of news reports of the event—engaging the core research question of how the reports rhetorically allude to major themes in existing climate discourse at the time—I apply close textual analysis to initial 20 and 21 November reports on the event from eight major news sources circulated through mainstream mass media and social media channels in the hours after the event: the Associated Press (2025), the BBC (Rannard, 2025), The New York Times (Friedman, 2025), Politico (Mathiesen, 2025), The Independent (Borenstein et al., 2025), Earth.org (Fonseca, 2025), The Guardian (Guardian Staff, 2025), and Reuters (2025)—plus the initial press release statement from COP30 itself. These sources were selected as merely a sample set of major news sites that report regularly on climate and the environment and are available to a broad audience/readership. English-language sources were selected for the purposes of this analysis, as it functions primarily within an English-language context. The analysis is followed, below, by a discussion of implications and suggestions for further inquiry.

3. Results

Analysis of allegory through word choice, parallelism, and allusion attends both to the referential cues and resonances present in a text and, also, to notable omissions and moments of dissonance that defy expectations but, in doing so, promote or strengthen the allegory. Close textual analysis of the nine sample texts published in the 24 h following the COP30 fire reveals two prominent allegorical themes: one attending to victims, harm, and panic and another attending to disruption and failure. Within the context of the UNFCCC and climate reporting, these themes liken the victims, harm, and panic in the moments surrounding the fire to the victims, harm, and panic of the climate crisis, and the disruptions and failures of a single afternoon to the disruptions and failures of the UNFCCC broadly over the past decade.

In both cases, the incidental allegory of a fire disrupting negotiation progress at a COP meeting in the Amazon emerges due to contextual irony. That is, the intense, sudden rise in heat; the panic and harm it caused; and the disruption to international, diplomatic progress are both exactly what the meeting was intended to avoid and—given the context of cynicism over COP’s delays and effectiveness, the recent Amazon wildfires, and Thunberg’s widely quoted “fire” remarks—entirely congruent and appropriate, a real-life event that was also, incidentally, a bluntly on-the-nose metaphor for the UNFCCC’s responses to climate change.

The texts of initial reports perpetuate and circulate this irony and metaphor through phrasing and word choice. Several of the reports subtly highlight the irony. The New York Times (Friedman, 2025), for instance, does so in its report’s final line, through juxtaposition, noting: “The area where the blaze occurred was at the main entrance to the venue, where countries have erected enormous pavilions to hold panel discussions and to highlight the ways their nations are addressing climate change.” This attention to the specific location of the fire at the “main” entrance and to the erection of “enormous” pavilions alongside “highlight[ing] the ways their nations are addressing climate change,” seems to subtly imply a commentary that the “main” ways the UNFCCC is addressing climate change are through ostentatious industrial and economic projects that result in calamity. Other reports are less subtle in highlighting the irony at play. The BBC (Rannard, 2025) ends its report on the fire by noting, “Nearly 200 countries are trying to agree on how to make progress in tackling climate change”; the qualified phrasing of “trying to agree on how to make progress” implies uncertainty and, perhaps, a lack of confidence in the process more than a simple, direct alternative phrase, like “are negotiating climate policy” or “are discussing international climate action” would. Politico (Mathiesen, 2025) includes an ironic critique of COP’s investment in corporate interests over actual negotiation by writing, “As a precaution, Brazil and the U.N. were closing the COP30 ‘blue zone’—the portion of the venue where diplomats and other delegates gather to conduct the summit’s official business—until at least 8 p.m. local time. The more corporate-friendly ‘green zone’ remained open.” The Independent (Borenstein et al., 2025) identified the irony and blunt metaphor of the situation most explicitly, leading with the headline: “Brazil’s final text proposal at UN climate talks draws fire as weak—after a real fire at the COP30.”

In each of these cases, the reports are simply conveying information about actual events, but their rhetorical choices in vocabulary, positioning, and phrasing highlight irony and theme.

Across all nine sample reports, special thematic attention is granted to victims, potential harm, and panic. The Associated Press, BBC, Politico, and Guardian all explicitly attend to the “13 people treated for smoke inhalation” in their opening lines. Several of the reports especially emphasize human experience in response to the calamity, with visceral detail of panic, fear, and harm, through first-person accounts. The BBC (Rannard, 2025), for instance, quotes Blue Zone presenter/COP attendee, Dr. Harshita Umesh, saying, “It was climbing the walls and onto the ceiling. People were screaming… Then I ran, I think I tripped and fell.” Dr. Umesh is also quoted as saying that “first responders inhaled ‘toxic fumes’ and were given oxygen masks to the site,” as well as “[e]mergency medicine specialist Kimberly Humphrey, currently helping patients at the COP medical centre,” who “told the BBC that the injuries are ‘Mainly people with smoke inhalation, someone with a lung injury from smoke.’” The BBC quotes Humphery again to state that, in the immediate aftermath of the fire, “People are pretty traumatised and shocked,” and also highlights that “A woman was taken away in a wheelchair, but it is not clear if that was connected to the fire” and “Hundreds of people were left sitting on the floor or on plastic chairs outside in high temperatures and humidity” (Rannard, 2025).

Such emphasis on visceral experiences of fear and harm put the reports’ focus on victims and vulnerability. The uniform focus across the report samples may have been informed by the COP30 press statement, which also opens and closes with special emphasis on people, smoke inhalation, medical support, and ensuring safety. In its opening lines, the COP30 statement reads,

Earlier today, a fire broke out in the Blue Zone of the COP30 venue in Belém. The fire department and UN security officers responded swiftly, and the fire was controlled in approximately six minutes. People were evacuated safely. Thirteen individuals were treated on site for smoke inhalation. Their condition is being monitored, and appropriate medical support has been provided.

(COP30, 2025b)

It then uses one sentence to announce that the Blue Zone has been temporarily closed “while the fire department carries out a comprehensive safety assessment,” before returning to an emphasis on safety and the welfare of the people in attendance, noting, “Delegates are requested to await further official communication, which will be issued at 8:00 p.m. this evening, once the venue has been thoroughly evaluated and deemed fully safe. We appreciate the cooperation and understanding of all participants as we prioritize the safety of everyone involved.”

Nevertheless, even if cued to attend to human experiences, potential victims, and safety by the press statement and information made readily available, the other reports all do then also afford special, additional attention to this theme of visceral vulnerability and panic. The BBC’s focus on an individual in a wheelchair, potentially unable to remove themselves from harm quickly enough on their own, and on the general discomfort experienced by others not treated for medical conditions but simply from “sitting on the floor or on plastic chairs outside in high temperatures and humidity” emphasizes human safety, vulnerability, and pain. Even the New York Times report, which was published before the official COP statement and injury numbers were available, focuses first, in its opening sentences, on potential for human harm and victimhood, stating, “A fire broke out on Thursday at a pavilion inside the convention hall in Belém, where more than 50,000 diplomats, journalists and activists have gathered for a global climate summit. It is not yet known what caused the fire or whether any injuries occurred” (Friedman, 2025).

This attention to harm and safety manifests incidental allegory in the context of the UNFCCC and climate crises, as recent loss and damage agreements have focused especially on the victims of rising global temperatures, sending emergency aid to those most vulnerable to climate impacts and climate-related harm.

The context of the Amazon wildfires—in which the “lungs of the planet” filling with smoke was already a widely accessible and circulated anthropomorphizing metaphor for harms of climate change—is then also amplified, through November 2025 reports of smoke in the Blue Zone pavilions. All eight sample reports explicitly emphasize the presence of “smoke” in the Blue Zone by name, and several reference the “toxic fumes” and “smoke inhalation” by victims onsite. The AP, BBC, Earth.org, and Reuters all explicitly attend to the COP30 security and emergency response teams.

The context of Thunberg’s “house on fire” analogy is echoed in report phrasing and vocabulary. The BCC and New York Times explicitly use the work “panic” to describe the scene of the event. Other reports use visceral, first-person accounts, like the BBC did, to illustrate the human experience of panic, fear, and harm, calling special attention to lone voices screaming warnings of fire, like Thunberg’s metaphorical warning. The Associated Press (2025) quotes Gabi Andrade, a COP30 volunteer, who attested “she saw black smoke,” adding “A security guard grabbed her hand and showed her to the exit as she cried and screamed ‘fire.’” Politico (Mathiesen, 2025) quoted Reginaldo Santos, a “member of the summit’s technical support team,” who said, “we were having a lecture in my booth, and we only heard the rush, everyone running, running, and then someone shouted, ‘It’s fire, it is fire, fire.’” The New York Times quotes Ana Silva, another volunteer, who “was with her colleagues when she noticed a commotion and then smoke,” as saying, “People started running right beside us […] Then a guy started yelling, ‘fire, fire’ in English and Portuguese ‘fire’ and ‘fogo’ and we started running.”

All of these reports act as rhetorical cues to the broader contexts, especially encouraging attention to the human experiences and threats at play. Even Earth.org (Fonseca, 2025), which takes a more skeptical tone on the effectiveness of recent COP meetings, attends especially to the visceral, onsite, human experiences of threat and potential harm. Their report notes that “A Pública reporter who was at the conference at the time of the fire managed to get out, but did not hear any emergency sirens,” and quotes a scheduled Blue Zone presenter, Marcelo Rocha, as saying, “There was no evacuation warning; we were the ones who started to organize ourselves. It was civilians who grabbed the fire extinguishers and tried to put out the fire.” Here, a bit of implicit commentary suggests that COP on 20 November 2025 failed to appropriately attend to threats and protect civilians and then, allegorically, that COPs broadly have failed to sufficiently attend to and “raise the alarm” for climate threats, leaving civilians worldwide, on the ground, in the immediate face of these threats to respond to emergencies on their own.

The connections between human experience, the UNFCCC, this one-time fire event, and climate action are not explicitly stated as similes in any of the reports, but context in recent climate reporting makes them readily available through enthymeme. The first-hand accounts describing running, screaming, and otherwise experiencing “panic” incidentally allude to Thunberg’s viral plea, warning that “inaction is fueling the flames by the hour.”

This enthymeme overlaps with the second thematic theme present in all nine sample texts: that of disruption and failure. In addition to attention to victims and harm, every report also then especially emphasizes the way in which the six-minute fire disrupted COP30 and suggests potential failings at the event. Even the initial COP30 press statement (COP30, 2025b), while avoiding suggestions of a “failure,” explicitly attends to the disruption, noting that “As a precaution, the Brazilian Government and the UNFCCC have jointly decided to temporarily close the Blue Zone while the fire department carries out a comprehensive safety assessment”—though, with a bit of perhaps unintended irony, the statement closes with a reminder, asking that audiences “Please note that the Green Zone remains open and activities continue as scheduled,” opening the statement up to enthymematic criticisms that COP organizers facilitate touristic and private-interest events like those in the Green Zone even as central stated missions and negotiations in the Blue Zone stall.

The very fact that a fire took place is a bit of a public relations crisis for COP30 organizers, as a fire emergency is inherently a failure, even if contained quickly. The ensuing media reports of the fire, thus, again, in vocabulary, positioning, and phrasing incidentally highlight irony and theme.

Reuters (2025) explicitly notes that the negotiations were “disrupted” with its headline, then emphasizes the allegory between the event’s disruption and UNCFCCC stalling and failures by noting:

The summit in the Amazon city was initially scheduled to wrap up on Friday, but it missed a self-imposed Wednesday deadline to secure agreement among the nearly 200 countries present on issues including how to increase climate finance and shift away from fossil fuels. // The fire scare occurred in what is already a hive of activity during the summit’s two-week run, interrupting ongoing negotiations inside the venue.

Explicit reference to missing deadlines and interrupted negotiations alludes, intentionally or not, to the series of missed deadlines and interruptions at COP in recent years. It notes that “it was unclear whether delegates would return immediately to continue negotiations” and ends its report by further inviting a skeptical interpretation, noting, “Since kicking off earlier this month, the summit has drawn multiple protests demanding climate action and forest protection, at times interrupting talks” (Reuters, 2025).

The Associated Press (2025) noted that after the disruption and “evacuation of the entire site for the conference,” it “wasn’t clear when the talks would resume.” The New York Times (Friedman, 2025) noted that even as “the fire had been contained within about 30 minutes,” delays and disruptions continued through the afternoon. They reported that “By 3 p.m., people had started to file back into the center but were escorted back out and told that an evacuation was underway” and that even after 4:20 p.m., when “the COP presidency announced that the fire had been contained ‘with limited damage,’” delegates “would not be allowed to return to the negotiation halls and to continue their work until late Thursday evening.” The Guardian (Guardian Staff, 2025) used its headline to stress that the “Cop30 climate summit in Brazil [was] disrupted” after the fire and suggests an atmosphere of chaos and potential failure as it describes the event being “thrown into confusion” and “disrupted” at a crucial moment, “just as negotiators were preparing to try to land a deal to strengthen international efforts to address the climate crisis.” Politico (Mathiesen, 2025) also tied the evacuation explicitly to delayed negotiation progress, stating that the evacuation was “complicating negotiations aimed at accelerating the global response to the Earth’s warming” and that “It was not immediately clear what impact the interruption will have on the negotiations, which have included discussions about accelerating the world’s turn away from fossil fuels and tripling the amount of climate assistance that rich countries would provide to poorer nations.”

Some reports, by virtue of juxtaposition, made the description of the negotiation disruption and critique of stalling negotiations even more open to comparison and allegorical reflection. The BBC (Rannard, 2025) explicitly noted that “A Brazilian security officer putting a chain through the gates of the venue with a chain told the BBC the premises must be evacuated and locked,” that “The fire is likely to delay the closing of a deal in the talks,” and that “a member of the UK delegation” said “the fire halted negotiations” while “A number of country delegations were forced to take shelter outside under the roof of a petrol station.” The literal re-location of climate delegates from the Blue Zone negotiations to a petrol station as a space of shelter and safety did not necessarily need to be included in the report, but it provides a deliciously critical metaphor for UNFCCC priorities regarding fossil fuels.

The BBC (Rannard, 2025), Politico (Mathiesen, 2025), and Associated Press (2025) explicitly note how the fire disrupted negotiations right before they could be concluded, on the event’s next-to-last scheduled day, as “talks were in the final hours of trying to agree on next steps to tackle climate change,” noting, however, that “the fire has disrupted negotiations and the talks remain closed” (Rannard, 2025).

The Guardian (Guardian Staff, 2025) included an extended contextual juxtaposition of remarks by Secretary-General Guterres, explicitly noting that Guterres “had appealed earlier in the day for a deal from the summit, welcoming calls from some for clarity on the hotly disputed subject of weaning the world off fossil fuels” before noting that “The entire venue had to be cleared” and that “it was likely to be several hours before any delegates were allowed to return,” throwing “a carefully choreographed series of meetings into confusion.” Its report is unique in its explicit attention to which elements of the UNFCCC would be postponed or canceled due to the fire event: “The Cop30 presidency was preparing a new draft text of the ‘mutirão’ decision, a central plan of the hoped for outcome of Cop30, and one that until Thursday contained a potential commitment to draw up a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels;” “The Alliance of Small Island States had been due to meet the presidency shortly before 4 p.m., but that was cancelled;” and “The EU was due to hold a ministerial coordination meeting at 6 p.m. before meeting the presidency at 9 p.m., but that timetable was thrown into doubt.” Guardian staff writers take the opportunity of reporting on the literal events and change in schedule to highlight the fire as a disruption that can lead to COP failures, noting, “The severity of the disruption at this stage of the talks is likely to make it impossible to stick to the timetable, and may push the talks, which are scheduled to finish on Friday evening, well into overtime” (Guardian Staff, 2025).

The fire event, thus, acts as synecdochic, symbolic metaphor for disruptions and delays in COP’s intentions. It is but one instance of the UNFCCC missing its own deadlines and tipping points by circumstance and necessity. The context of previous reports on previous instances allows reports on a literal fire event to manifest as an allegory for COP’s failures broadly. If the media audience was already primed to interpret the COP30 event with skepticism and anticipation of shortcomings and failures, the fire evacuation served as a crystallizing focal point and illustrative instance of where COP30 was always already bound to stumble, come up short, or spectacularly fail.

The fire itself is a literal, infrastructural failure. Associated Press (2025) wrote, “Para state Gov. Helder Barbalho told local news outlet G1 that a generator failure or a short circuit in a booth may have started the fire.” The Associated Press then uses its report as an opportunity to highlight other infrastructural shortcomings at Belém, noting,

Much of the summit venue in Belem [sic] was still under construction right up until the conference opened, with exposed beams, open plywood floors and metal meshed-in corridors leading nowhere outside the convention center. During a pre-summit event, drilling and jackhammering could be heard as world leaders delivered speeches and scores of workers in hardhats scurried around unfinished pavilions shrouded in plastic.

(Associated Press, 2025)

It also highlights how this infrastructural failure seemed to mar the entire event, with Gabi Adrade, quoted again, saying “’It’s so sad for us […] We all worked so hard.’” Broadly, the reports demonstrate, implicitly or explicitly, how the fire event is indicative of shortcomings and failures at COP30 broadly. The New York Times (Friedman, 2025) calls the fire event the “latest in a series of mishaps for the annual conference this year,” noting,

The summit venue had come under criticism this week. Rain from a torrential downpour leaked into the meeting spaces, dripping on delegates. There were complaints about food shortages, and the air-conditioning struggled to keep up with the high heat and humidity. Simon Stiell, the U.N. climate chief, called for tighter security after protesters forced their way into the venue. // In a letter to the chief of staff of the Brazilian president and to André Corrêa do Lago, the Brazilian diplomat presiding over the summit, Mr. Stiell flagged security concerns, like unsecured doors, as well as safety concerns, like malfunctioning air-conditioning and rainwater seeping into lighting fixtures.

(Friedman, 2025)

These details, by virtue of their inclusion in this case, frame the event in a Burkean sense. Their inclusion invites critique and the allegory that was, at first, merely incidental and enthymematic.

The same is true for reporting by The Independent (Borenstein et al., 2025), which is most explicit in its ideological commentary and critique of the UNFCCC. Independent writers open their report with the sublead headline: “Brazil has offered several texts for this year’s last day of the U.N. climate talks but what was supposed to be nearly final proposals on key contentious issues failed to explicitly mention fossil fuels—the cause of global warming.” In its first sentences, less than 24 h after the fire, the report instead casts attention on contention and the UNFCCC’s failure to achieve things it was “supposed” to do. The article begins, following the sublead, by stating, “This omission upset more than two dozens [sic] nations, along with advocates for stronger action,” and only then explicitly shifts to focus to the fire event, noting, “On top of that, it came on the heels of a fire on Thursday that briefly spread through pavilions of the conference known as COP30 on the edge of the Amazon, prompting evacuations. Officials said 13 people were treated for smoke inhalation” (Borenstein et al., 2025). The writers here explicitly lean into the opportunity to treat the fire evacuation as a symptomatic allegory for the conference’s broader failures and shortcomings. The report spends as much print space detailing the stalled mutirão decision and efforts to create a roadmap for global phaseout of fossil fuels as it does reporting on the fire event. Of the statements established in the mutirão decision, it claims, “Some nations think that’s not nearly enough,” and notes that “An upset response letter was drafted by some countries to the documents, which has the potential to further delay the proceedings.” With respect to the fire-necessitated delays, the Independent notes that “COP30 was to end Friday” then adds, “the U.N. climate talks usually extend an extra day or two,” suggesting that the disruption and delay caused by the fire is not an unusual event but rather, characteristic of COP proceedings as usual. The report then explicitly quotes the letter “from 29 nations, including wealthy ones such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany along with smaller climate vulnerable islands Palau, Marshall Islands and Vanuatu” expressing “deep concern” that the proposal on the table “does not meet the minimum conditions required for a credible COP outcome.” It notes that “Activists were just as unhappy” with COP30 and directly quotes several of them. Greenpeace representative Tracy Carty is quoted as saying, “Hopes were raised by initial proposals for road maps both to end deforestation and fossil fuels, but these road maps have disappeared,” and “We’re again lost without a map to 1.5 °C and fumbling our way in the dark while time is running out.” Bronwen Tucker of Oil Change International is quoted as calling the proposal “a shamefully weak text that fails to mention fossil fuels, fails to deliver accountability towards rich countries’ finance obligations, and only makes vague promises on adaptation.” Here, the Independent report also, again, demonstrates themes of vulnerability and activists, like Thunberg, decrying climate action as usual, infused with “hope” but not results.

The two recurrent themes of victims/harm/panic and disruptions/failures overlap one another in places, but they appear demonstrably in all nine of the texts/reports. Their recurrence was not an intentional, coordinated effort among the different media outlets but, rather, the incidental outcome of reporters describing and conveying details of the same event within the same discursive contexts. This is how incidental allegory takes form in journalism and other non-fiction reports.

That incidental allegory is open and accessible to a broad news media audience even when unintended and even when not all audiences consume the same media for their reports of news events is evidenced by how each reporter/outlet covering the COP30 fire demonstrated the same two core themes. The recurrence of these themes suggests that each author, whether intentionally or unintentionally, articulated the literal events from similar vantage points, primed by their participation in existing discourse and public conversation. As Burke and Farrell argue, this is how our shared frames and shared public doxa come into form: communicators encounter ideas through existing vocabulary, allusions, associations, and values, then articulate their encounters with existing vocabulary, allusions, associations, and values, spreading them to be encountered, interpreted, reinterpreted, or argued against in the wider public. The authors of these reports were not solely intentional in the sewing of the allegory; rather, the immediate, incidental contexts and ongoing conversations around the COP30 fire made these themes and associations especially available.

That these particular themes, manifesting allegory, are especially prominent in the reports is all the more apparent when considering that other themes and frames could just as likely be applied to the reports but, in effect, were not applied—or, at least, were not applied universally or uniformly. That is, there are other themes and frames that could have been prominent in the reporting of the event that were not. Here is where attention to omission and contradiction in the analysis becomes most useful.

For instance, reports could have emphasized questions about the cause of the fire. Information answering that question was not available in the immediate aftermath of the event, but not all of the reports even addressed the question of cause. Those that did qualified their information as speculative, and the information differed from report to report. The Guardian (Guardian Staff, 2025) reported that the cause was “believed to be an electrical device, probably a microwave,” citing Reuters and the local fire department. The BBC (Rannard, 2025) reported that “One eyewitness told the BBC that he believes an electrical fire was the cause.” The New York Times (Friedman, 2025) explicitly stated that no cause was yet known, and Earth.org (Fonseca, 2025) noted that the cause was still under investigation. The question about a cause is a valid theme for a news report about a fire event, but it was treated differently and did not appear explicitly in all of the reports examined.

Alternatively, another sometimes present theme was that of China, Africa, and the physical, spatial layout of nearby pavilions. Some of the reports made explicit reference to the nation exhibitor pavilions located closest to the blaze, and some did not. The Associated Press (2025) quoted Brazil’s Tourism Minister, Celso Sabino, who “told journalists at the scene that the fire started near the China Pavilion, which was among several pavilions set up for events on the sidelines of the climate talks,” and Samuel Rubin, “one of the people in charge of an entertainment and culture pavilion,” who said, “The fire quickly spread to neighboring pavilions,” including “many of the Africa pavilions and one aimed at youth.” The Associated Press also explicitly situated the fire near the Singapore pavilion. The New York Times (Friedman, 2025), in its report, made no mention of China or Singapore, but stated that the fire “appears to have started in a pavilion highlighting Africa, according to two people who were nearby when it began.” Meanwhile, Earth.org (Fonseca, 2025) pays great attention to suggestions that the fire began “in the China pavilion,” citing it as anti-Chinese misinformation, and instead asserted that initial reports claimed the fire began “at the East African Community stand in the Africa Pavilion area.” This question of location, and the implications of different nations being more or less associated with the outbreak of the emergency, could be rhetorically rich, casting political and cultural accusations—but the theme did not appear in all reports, and it appeared differently when it did.

A third theme that appeared in some reports (Fonseca, 2025; Friedman, 2025; Reuters, 2025) was that of the Brazilian Ministry of Tourism’s role and authority at the COP. In these reports, Brazil’s Minister of Tourism, Celso Sabino, was cited prominently as a primary authority. Analysis might attend to Sabino’s prominence and analyze its implications for ongoing conversations about whether COP is becoming more of a tourism-boosting economic event and less of a space for climate policy and negotiation. But here, again, the theme was not recurrent nor apparent in all reports.

And, of course, there are innumerable other ways that a report could have, in theory, covered the fire event, with use of specific words, perspectives, and details that might encourage different associations and interpretations among its audiences. However, in those cases, an analysis would be more an exploration of the individual artistic additions of the specific reporter. A literary or rhetorical analysis would not be about the news event but about the author as rhetor, advocate, or artist.

When examining the role of media and journalism in shaping visions of sustainability and stewardship, analysis of specific, influential, prominent, or otherwise notable journalists and their rhetorical tactics is valuable and worthwhile. However, that is not what I have attempted to illustrate here, with the case of the COP30 fire and incidental allegory.

Rather, with this case example, I have sought to demonstrate how the report of an event itself, couched in its immediate discursive context, hits upon already available themes, inviting allegorical articulation and engagement. Questions about the cause of the Belém fire could, in theory, act rhetorically as an allegory for questions about the cause of climate change. Remarks and themes about China, Africa, and other locations could act rhetorically as commentary on how climate change is affecting (and is affected by) specific nations, peoples, and regions. Thematic focus or prominence granted to tourism officials could act rhetorically to endow authority to tourist interests or raise questions about tourism’s role in shaping the COPs. But none of these themes were already widely present in the global English-language discourse, and none of them quite so literally overlapped with the events to report: of fire, or harm and peril, or failure, disruption, and delay. The immediate event itself and the immediate discursive contexts echo one another, almost bluntly, and that is likely why the themes appear across multiple agencies and reports; that is where implicit allegory takes form. In the final section, I summarize my findings, make suggestions as to how journalists and media outlets can harness implicit allegory to promote sustainable practice, and recommend avenues for future research to build upon and expand these initial ideas.

4. Discussion

This essay applied close textual analysis in context to news reports covering the 20 November 2025 fire at the UNFCCC COP30 meeting in Belém, Brazil, to demonstrate how allegory can manifest in non-fiction reporting of real-world events. It asked how press reports of the fire rhetorically alluded to other major themes in existing climate change and climate policy discourse at the time, and how this rhetorical allusion is traceable in the text of the reports themselves. It identified and evidenced the recurrence of two prominent allegorical themes across the reports: one attending to victims, harm, and panic, and another attending to disruption and failure. It argued that these themes need not be intentional nor fully accidental but that they guide ensuing conversation and contribute to social knowledge (doxa) regarding the UNFCCC all the same. Within the context of the UNFCCC and climate reporting, these themes liken the victims, harm, and panic in the moments surrounding the fire to the victims, harm, and panic of the climate crisis, and the disruptions and failures of a single afternoon to the disruptions and failures of the UNFCCC broadly over the past decade. Because the rhetorical/allegorical themes manifest across multiple news reports due to their shared context, I refer to the phenomenon as incidental allegory.

This allegory manifests in the context of its articulation, circulation, and reception, through poetic cues, subtle resonances, and moments of dissonance, even in ostensibly objective reports, that invite association with or comparison between the literal event reported and other events, ideas, or phenomena.

While this essay focuses on the case of the COP30 fire, there are several other examples of incidental allegory in climate and environment reporting that could further illuminate the ideas conveyed here. For instance, when COP28 was hosted in Dubai, UAE, there was a three-part physical allegory available regarding air quality and emissions: attendees, mainstream reporters, and social media commentators all noticed a resonance between the hazy air surrounding the venue due to sand particulate clouds over the region, the fossil fuel emissions at the heart of COP negotiations and clearly visible from smokestacks surrounding the venue in a nation driven by fossil fuel economies, and the uncertain, “hazy,” or murky” outlook for negotiations at the conference at the time. The physical environment for the convention metaphorically echoed the fog of diplomacy within the negotiation halls. In Tanzania, when the glaciers at the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro melted away, circumstance and existing discourse hearkened to the themes of inevitable death, despair, and regret in Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” When Lonesome George, the last known tortoise of his subspecies, died in the Galápagos Islands, a place famed for its natural selection and Darwin’s work on species evolution, the story seemed custom-made for discussions about evolution, speciation, and extinction. And, as noted earlier in this essay, the deforestation of a portion of the Amazon for construction of a highway to facilitate access to COP30 struck many as a cruel allegory for the misplaced, or even hypocritical, priorities of COP organizers.

In these moments, when incidental allegory manifests, there is opportunity for media and journalism to influence attitudes and promote ecological action in novel ways. The power of the incidental allegory, as argued above, is in its enthymematic qualities. The report need not stretch or craft a complex argument to make its inherent allusions and implications clear. It merely needs to report on the incident and allow the audience to recognize the poetic cues, subtle resonances, and contextual dissonances for themselves.

In the context of this Special Issue, however, attention to incidental allegory in real-world events and reporting on real-world events reveals a clear opportunity. Journalists reporting on events with incidental allegorical elements can lean into those elements and emphasize them through word choice, prominence, and position in their reporting. They need not infuse their report with explicit simile or commentary but can rely on context and existing discourse/symbolism to allow audiences to make the allegorical connections on their own. Several of the reports described in this essay appear to deploy this tactic, retaining a degree of plausible deniability in their sticking to the pure facts, but fostering sentiments of skepticism toward COP proceedings, priorities, and progress already available in public discourse and sentiment, stoking those sentiments to grow further through doxastic circulation in the digital public sphere. Audiences, then, can take up the allegory more explicitly in social media forwards, likes, memes, and commentary of their own. The allegory, in the sphere of social knowledge, can become a rallying example, crystallizing sentiments in an easy-to-replicate common referent or symbolic package. Environmental reporting may use such tactics to, as Szerszynski (2007) and Rickards (2020) suggest, direct public attention to situational irony and simulation politics. And that is why this one case example has implications for climate reporting broadly.

Certainly, different journalists will apply different approaches; some may be tactfully subtle, while others, like the Independent article, may use the opportune allegorical moment to explicitly encourage certain sentiments, but because the allegory in this case is not solely created by a single author, it is available as a rhetorical tool to all types of reporting. Within the themes of this Special Issue, environmental journalists and media can report on incidentally allegorical events that encourage ecological reflexivity, resilience, resistance, and novel conceptualizations of human relationships with the planet Earth.

As points for continued inquiry, there are two obvious paths for future researchers. First, in order to better understand how journalists and other reporters intentionally or unintentionally utilize such allegory, those reporters should be asked directly. Interviews or surveys with reporters on the subject asking about their awareness of the rhetorical phenomena described here, will grant a better concept of how reports already use such tactics and how they can be honed and adapted for more effective environmental advocacy in the future.

Second, while it seems likely that enthymemes and readily available allegory would increase engagement with reports on social media, a proper media-use and corpus analysis would help determine whether reports demonstrating incidental allegory are indeed forwarded, circulated, or otherwise engaged more frequently. Such a study could gather social media engagement with COP30 fire reports or other reports to learn and document how such stories develop in the hands of the digital public. Doing so would grant fuller understanding of doxa and construction of social knowledge in the digital sphere.

Continued analysis could also simply consider other events as case examples to analyze rhetorically, or expand rhetorical analysis to non-English language reports of such cases, to give a fuller grasp of allegory in news event reporting in different cases and cultures. The way in which media report on climate decisions and policies influences doxastic perspectives, interpretations, and sentiments towards those decisions and policies.

As global temperatures rise, we feel the heat. This spurs urgency, and reporters can indeed act, even in subtle ways, by simply reporting on the resonances and allusions naturally occurring around us. When there is a fire, media reports can call it out, raising the alarm.