This OECD Environmental Police Paper was published on 7th April 2026.

Following the devastating 2017 wildfires, Portugal embarked on a series of reforms to improve its wildfire management. With the creation of the Integrated Rural Fire Management System (IRFMS), wildfire management became a policy priority across government and non-government agencies, leading to a sizeable scale-up of resources aimed at limiting wildfire damages.

The introduction of the IRFMS has improved institutional, regulatory and financing conditions for wildfire management. The IRFMS developed a unified strategy, clarified responsibilities across national, regional, and municipal levels for fire prevention and response, and created the Agency for Integrated Rural Fire Management (AGIF) to coordinate all involved entities. Fire regulations were strengthened through stricter buffer zones, higher penalties, and improved fire-resistant building standards. New incentives promoted prescribed burning and strategic fuel mosaics, increasingly recognising the role of landscape- and nature-based approaches to reduce wildfire risk. Since 2018, public funding for wildfire management has doubled, with prevention now representing nearly half of total fire-related expenditure.

The IRFMS also strengthened data and information systems to better ground fire management decisions in evidence. Portugal has since developed national fire hazard and risk maps covering all the country’s fire-prone areas, which enable decision makers to identify the most exposed localities. Tools and technologies to monitor fire behaviour and adapt suppression activities were improved, and a monitoring and evaluation system for all projects funded under the IRFMS was established. These initiatives enhanced transparency and efficiency in resource allocation by improving targeting and prioritisation of measures. Through annual and quarterly progress reports and lessons learned processes, the IRFMS also promotes continuous learning and improvement across all agencies.

Nevertheless, the scale and damage of the 2024 and 2025 wildfires point to a need to accelerate reform implementation. In 2024, 35 fires burning over 500 hectares accounted for 84% of the total annual burned area, and the summer of 2025 again saw the occurrence of large fires, whose burned area surpassed that of the 2017 fires that triggered the IRFMS reform. These events revealed several shortcomings:

• Persistent regulatory weaknesses. A high number of human-caused ignitions and persistent gaps in meeting fuel management targets indicate challenges in ensuring regulatory compliance. Some regulations are perceived as top-down and misaligned with local realities. Limited enforcement and weak sanctions further reduce compliance.
• Frequent shifts in institutional arrangements could undermine progress. Moving AGIF’s coordinating function from the Prime Minister’s office to a sectoral ministry that developed its own Forest Intervention Plan, which is complementary but sometimes overlapping with the IRFMS’ strategy, could weaken clarity, coherence, political leadership, and the very integrated approach built in recent years.
• Complex and multiple large fires remain difficult to contain. Increasingly severe fire weather conditions (e.g. temperature increases and prolonged dry periods) and socio-economic changes that reduce active land management practices, combined with the governance challenges mentioned above, make complex fires especially challenging to manage.
• Fire hazard and risk maps are contested locally. This delays the adoption of municipal execution plans, which are critical for accessing funding and implementing fire regulations.
• Public funding arrangements are fragmented and provide limited incentives for private investment in wildfire prevention. Fragmented funding sources leave actors often unaware of available resources. Ambiguity around government ex post compensation for fire losses further weakens incentives for preventive investment, while low and costly insurance coverage in high-risk areas limits financial protection and discourages proactive risk reduction.
• Incomplete loss and damage accounting. Data collection on observed forest, infrastructure and building losses and damages is improving, but is not yet systematically compiled or used to guide funding allocation decisions.
• Monitoring and evaluation efforts have not sufficiently improved transparency, accountability and continuous improvement. While information on the implementation of wildfire management measures is being collected, existing indicators do not sufficiently capture outcomes such as improvements in wildfire resilience. Equally, evaluation tools are not fully used to track transparency and accountability and inform continuous improvement.

Build a stronger institutional framework

• Maintain commitment to an integrated approach to wildfire management. Future institutional reforms should preserve and build on the core achievements of the IRFMS’ integrated and coordinated approach, ensuring clear responsibilities and accountability in institutional arrangements across all government and non-government actors.

  Further strengthen prevention

• Simplify and tailor regulations to local conditions, ensuring they account for territorial differences and facilitate compliance for different target groups. Design proportional and enforceable sanctions that can effectively encourage preventative behaviour.
• Address structural constraints to effective fuel management implementation by accelerating land registration, prioritising abandoned or highly flammable vegetation, and continuing targeted behavioural prevention to reduce human-caused ignitions.
• Further integrate active land management and ecosystem-based approaches into fire risk reduction, including sustainable forest management and conservation of natural assets, and promoting native and broadleaf species where appropriate.

Enhance funding efficiency

• Develop a long-term comprehensive wildfire funding strategy to increase the efficiency of wildfire management expenditures. This could shed light on all wildfire funding resources available, clarify ex ante and ex post cost-sharing mechanisms between government levels and public-private actors, revise fiscal equalisation rules to better support high-risk areas, and create incentives for sustainable land management and ecosystem services.

Further anchor wildfire management decisions in evidence

• Improve hazard data by mapping high-value assets to further support planning and prioritisation of fire management measures.

  Continue strengthening monitoring and evaluation of the IRFMS. Existing indicators could be improved to better evaluate outcomes. Lessons learned processes could be conducted more regularly. Fostering a strong evaluation culture and linking decisions (including spending) to clear accountability mechanisms can improve performance, and operational efficiency.

Increase community engagement

• Emphasise inclusiveness in developing local hazard maps. Including local actors in the design of these maps, thereby valuing their knowledge of fire occurrence and spread, can increase the acceptance of fire prevention measures, and compliance with fire regulations.

Full report https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/towards-an-integrated-rural-fire-management-framework-in-portugal_9cb528df-en/full-report/component-3.html#chapter-d1e111