Lisbon, June 25, 2025 (Lusa) - The fires of September 2024 highlighted “areas for strengthening” in the system regarding cooperation between national and regional entities and in the command and control of operations, concluded the Agency for Integrated Rural Fire Management (AGIF).
"The response also highlighted areas for improvement, particularly in the capacity to effectively manage several complex events simultaneously, Incomplete management of rural areas, the need for more supervision, especially in urban-rural interface areas, and also more effective community safety programmes aggravate the situation,” writes AGIF in the 2024 report of the Integrated Rural Fire Management System (SGIFR) delivered today to parliament and the government.
In the document, AGIF, led by Tiago Oliveira, stressed that although the authorities issued the extreme risk alert 72 hours in advance, the fires in September 2024 highlighted the need for improved “strategic coordination,” more comprehensive “preparation,” and smoother “cooperation between national and regional entities” which “highlighted the need to improve the organisation of resources”.
That entity also considers that “the extreme events in September demonstrated the system’s sensitivity to peaks of meteorological severity, despite the general trend towards a reduction in the number of high-risk days”.
“However, the September fires once again drew attention to the need for stronger anticipation, planning and communication capacity, ensuring command and control of operations and the multiple teams involved, guaranteeing specialisation and the use of perimeter techniques with tools, fire and machinery, and strengthening the quality of decision-making in the management of surveillance, suppression and logistics resources,” the report stated.
AGIF emphasised the “progress and positive results” achieved by SGIFR over the last five years. The fires in September 2024 highlighted areas where further strengthening is needed, areas already identified in previous reports and still advancing towards the 2030 vision of a Portugal protected from serious rural fires.
In the document, AGIF soke of “a collective success in significantly reducing the number of fires and the frequency of large fires”, but warned that in some densely wooded regions, such as the north and the coastal centre, land abandonment and inadequate forest management have led to “dramatic results”, especially in the wake of fires that firefighters did not extinguish during the initial attack.
Last year, authorities recorded 6,255 fires, representing a 17% reduction compared to 2023.
In the post-2017 period (2018-2024), authorities recorded an average of 9,304 fires per year, representing a 63% decrease compared to the annual average for the period 2001-2017, which was 24,950 occurrences.
AGIF reports that this downward trend continued even on days with severe weather, showing a 54% decrease compared to the same periods.
In turn, the area burned last year was 137,667 hectares, four times more than in the previous year. Over the last seven years (2018-2024), records show an average of 66,360 hectares of area burned, representing a 59% decrease compared to the annual average for the period 2001-2017, which was 161,437 hectares.
The report indicates that September accounted for 92% of the total area burned during the whole of 2024.
As already warned in the 2023 report, AGIF in the document released today again stresses that reducing the number of occurrences and the area burned without managing the post-fire situation “causes fine vegetation, shrubs and trees to accumulate, which fuels faster and more severe fires,” putting the country at the same risk as in 2017.
“Timely, large-scale intervention in the remaining green areas over the last seven years could prevent the destruction of more than 750,000 hectares in a single year and protect sites, infrastructure, and urban communities,” it warns.
AGIF also stated that it has submitted a report to the government on the major fires of 2024, which points to improvements to be made to the system, such as better training and decision-making capacity, recovery of burned areas, greater transparency on risk, reduction of incentives for construction in interface areas and strengthening of the management capacity of the National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority.
CMP/ADB // ADB.
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