Portugal Built a National Wildfire Agency. Britain Still Has No Strategy
Quick summary
Britain’s wildfire risk is rising, with incidents now exceeding previous record years.
Portugal created AGIF to coordinate prevention, land use and emergency response.
Britain’s response remains fragmented across departments, agencies and voluntary forums.
The transferable lesson is coordinated wildfire governance suited to Britain’s landscape.
British wildfire is no longer a rare summer story. The National Fire Chiefs Council recorded 996 wildfire incidents across England and Wales by early September 2025 — more than the 994 logged in the whole of 2022, until then the worst year on record.
The fires are arriving earlier and reaching ground once thought too wet to burn.
As the risk climbs, a fair question follows: who is in charge of managing it? Britain has skilled fire and rescue services that tackle wildfires well. What it does not have is a single body joining up the whole chain of wildfire risk — the fuel on the ground, the land-management rules, peatland restoration and the emergency response.
Some countries have made a different choice.
What Portugal built, and why
In 2017, Portugal suffered rural fires that killed over 100 people. The response was institutional. In 2018 the country created the Agency for Integrated Rural Fire Management (AGIF), and in 2020 adopted a National Plan for Integrated Management of Rural Fires running to 2030.
The word that matters is integrated. Rather than leaving prevention, land use and firefighting to separate silos, AGIF was designed to join them up under one coordinating roof.
Portugal is not alone. In Spain, Catalonia's GRAF units are specialist teams built around integrated fire management. France operates a formal system of planned burning, brûlage dirigé.
The common thread is a recognition that wildfire is not only an emergency-response problem; it is a land-management problem that has to be planned for in advance, across departments.
Behind these institutions sits a hard-won idea sometimes called the "fire paradox": decades of successful suppression can reduce burnt area in the short term while allowing fuel to build up, setting the stage for larger, harder-to-control fires under extreme weather. The institutional answer is to manage the fuel, not just fight the flames.
Britain's picture: able response, fragmented responsibility
Britain does respond to wildfire, and does it competently. Fire and rescue services attend as a statutory duty. The Home Office has been the lead government department for severe wildfire since 2016, and issued a national framework document — last updated in December 2021 — setting out who is responsible for what.
Coordination and good practice are carried largely by cross-sector groups: the England and Wales Wildfire Forum, the Scottish Wildfire Forum and the NFCC's wildfire group.
These bring together fire services, government agencies, researchers and land managers — the Moorland Association is one member among many, and has helped develop training for land managers working alongside fire crews.
But these forums are voluntary and non-statutory, and the links in the chain sit in different places. In England, responsibility for fire and rescue services moved to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in April 2025; Defra leads on land management and wildfire mitigation; the Cabinet Office handles national risk.
There is a framework document, but no national wildfire strategy — a gap the England and Wales Wildfire Forum has itself flagged, alongside a call for better coordination between the Home Office, Defra and the Cabinet Office. The NFCC has likewise called for more consistency, coordination and resourcing.
That is the real contrast with Portugal — not the absence of firefighters, but the absence of a single, cross-departmental body with a standing remit to join prevention, land use and response together.
The devolved layer
Wildfire policy is devolved, so the rulebook changes with the border. In England, the 2025 regulations lowered the protected deep-peat threshold to 30cm and extended controls across all upland Less Favoured Areas. In Scotland, a licensing scheme under the 2024 Muirburn Act is expected to go live in autumn 2026, with mandatory accredited training.
In Wales, managed burning follows a code that rules out blanket bog, wet heath and mires. Northern Ireland, the fourth UK nation, also has its own arrangements. Several rulebooks, and no single body drawing them together.
What Britain can learn
The ecology of Portugal, Catalonia and France may be different to Britain, but one thing that can be transferred is the governance: strategic planning, trained and accredited burners, formal burn plans, smoke management, and a coordinating institution that treats fuel as a landscape-scale problem rather than a series of isolated sites.
Whether Britain needs its own version of Portugal’s AGIF is a question for government, and one the wildfire forums and fire chiefs have already put on the table.
Key Takeaway
Britain has capable fire services but no national wildfire strategy and no single statutory agency joining up prevention, land use and response. Coordination rests on voluntary forums — which the Moorland Association sits on — while responsibility is split across the Home Office/MHCLG, Defra and the Cabinet Office.
Portugal built exactly such an agency, AGIF, after 2017. The transferable lesson is the coordination model, not the overseas ecology or fire figures, which do not carry onto UK peat.
Why this matters
As wildfire risk rises across Britain's uplands, the clearest lesson from abroad that we need to join up the people and departments who prevent and fight wildfire before the next fire starts.
