Our Planet Climate and Geopolitics
As wildfires ravage thousands of acres of central and southern Chile, claiming at least 112 lives with hundreds more missing, an increasingly active Chilean K-pop super-fan movement has launched a disaster relief fundraising campaign. With an estimated 200 million K-Pop fans globally, the world’s most active fanbase has a history of unexpected political interventions in South America. In Chile, K-pop fans were linked to the 2019 student protests and campaigned for the election of president Gabriel Boric in 2021. Across the globe, a K-pop tree planting initiative Fandom 4 Forest claims to have planted 113,824 trees across 21 countries. Over the weekend, as firefighters struggled to contain blazes sweeping through coastal towns, Chilean K-pop social media feeds carried the equivalent of a disaster broadcast under the heading K-pop Unido: Donations for Chile.