Rural fires in 2025 pushed the burned area to 98% of the extent forecast through 2030 by the National Action Program (PNA) designed by the authorities, the environmental association Zero warned today.
“Portugal has already exhausted around 98% of the limit of burned area foreseen for the entire 2020-2030 decade—and there are still five years to go until 2030,” the association said in a statement, reacting to the report from the Integrated System for the Management of Rural Fires (SGIFR), released on Monday by Lusa.
The data show a “dual portrait,” with “fewer fatalities and a more effective operational response,” while 2025 was “the fourth-worst year in burned area since 2001, with double the area burned in 2024 and more ignitions than in the previous year.”
Furthermore, the “arson continues to be one of the most destructive causes of the system.”
The association criticized the situation of the Agency for Integrated Fire Management (AGIF), which is “without an effective presidency since 2024,” at a moment “when the implementation of the PNA has advanced only to 53%, with 21% of the initiatives still to be started.”
For Zero, “the 2030 targets are increasingly distant from being met” and they show the risk to the system’s sustainability, as indicated by the 2025 data.
Last year, there was an increase in ignitions and in the burned area (“271 thousand hectares, practically double the 137 thousand recorded in 2024”) with the 44 largest fires “responsible for 91% of all the burned area of the year.”
“Ignitions due to negligent use of fire also rose again (+27%), confirming that there is no longer a contrast between social behavior and meteorological severity: both indicators worsened simultaneously,” warned the environmentalists, who note human action as the cause of the most destructive fires.
Of the “six largest fires of the year, (160,048 hectares, more than half of the total burned area), only one originated in arson; the remaining resulted from two lightning strikes, two uses of fire (one cigarette, one campfire) and a transport accident, all within the same seven-day window of extreme weather conditions.”
“In 2025, arson and the use of fire remained the main identified causes of fires, jointly accounting for about 78% of incidents with a determined cause.”
In a comparison between the data and the PNA, the association noted that the “proportion of large fires remains more than 50% above the target defined for 2030” and criticized the lack of use of fire to combat the fires.
“Controlled burning, the most effective and cheapest prevention tool that exists, continues to be the most neglected, and instead of growing, its execution fell even further in 2025, to less than half of the annual target,” explained Zero.
The environmental association lamented that the “management of rural fires continues not to be treated as a cross-cutting priority of the State,” with AGIF failing to “respond directly to the prime minister,” shifting “to the tenure of the Ministry of Agriculture, a change that, instead of resolving the agency’s institutional fragility, seems to be deepening it.”
In 2025, “rural fires were responsible for the release of about 3.6 million tonnes of carbon — approximately double the historical average since 2003 and the equivalent to 24% of all national annual emissions,” which, according to Zero, “is an undeniable contradiction.”
This is because “it is not possible to talk about credible climate policy in Portugal while the management of the rural territory continues to generate, every year, an emissions volume comparable to that of entire sectors of the economy.”
