| By Brian Kahn When homes are ablaze, firefighters will run toward them. The same holds true for forests, even when they're thousands of miles away. Countries including the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa rely on what's known as mutual aid agreements to help each other battle blazes in times of need. I worked with my colleagues Danielle Bochove and Joe Wertz to understand the mindset of wildland firefighters who raise their hands to travel abroad and how climate change means they may be forced to stay put and fight fire at home. Read our story here. While there are obvious benefits to sharing firefighting resources around the globe — putting out fires is perhaps top of the list — our reporting turned up a few second-order ones that shouldn't be discounted. At a national level, loaning out your firefighters or equipment is a useful form of soft power. Consider the countless headlines over the past few weeks as Mexican, Canadian and US firefighters have battled the Los Angeles conflagrations shoulder-to-shoulder. Canada's so-called "Super Scooper" aircraft have even become local celebrities on the level of Sabrina Carpenter, unmistakable for their bright yellow paint jobs and ability to, well, scoop up water from the Pacific to douse fires again and again. Pascal Duclos, one of the pilots, told us he did 23 missions in a day in an attempt to quell the flames.  A plane drops water on the Palisades fire over Los Angeles County, California. Photographer: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images To be sure, the Canadian firefighters are being paid by their American counterparts. But the goodwill is unmistakable. But that's not the only extra benefit. When firefighters deploy abroad, they often learn from their hosts and vice versa. In a world of increasingly fierce fires, this type of knowledge exchange can't be discounted. Take the relationship between the Australian state of New South Wales and California. Their fire agencies are regarded as some of the best in the world, and they're helping each other in very tangible ways. "We've been learning from Cal Fire because they've got a really good aviation program," said New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS) Commissioner Rob Rogers. He added that "some of our people get experience" maintaining and flying aircraft as the Australian state looks to revamp its own aerial firefighting program. In return, the RFS has shared insights into its use of artificial intelligence for early fire detection. Ultimately, overlapping fire seasons are putting a strain on the supply of equipment and personnel and relationships. But so too could an increasingly transactional global order fraught with competition for resources. That shift is being led by US President Donald Trump, who has chided Canada and threatened a wide array of tariffs. If that attitude extends to fighting fires abroad, Eric Kennedy, a disaster management researcher at York University in Toronto, sees consequences: "It would undermine American soft power around the world to no longer be plugged in and seen as a mentor and a partner and a collaborator in the space." Read more in today's Big Take on Bloomberg.com. | 
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