“What I can say is that for all the indicators we have today, the year 2023 will be even more difficult than the year 2022 was”, said José Luís Carneiro to journalists.

Reinforcing that the year will be "very difficult", the minister said that everyone has to do their part.

"We have to prepare, we are preparing, but it is clear that the means are always limited in emergency circumstances and what we have to do is each one's part", he stressed.

The minister stressed that the Portuguese State, Civil Protection and local authorities are trying to do their part, but everyone has to contribute because 55 percent of the fires that broke out in 2022 were due to negligence.

It means, he added, that if there was more care, responsibility and other attitudes, that the number of fires caused by negligence could be lower.

In addition, José Luís Carneiro said that the GNR is already all over the country raising awareness of the need for preventive cleaning and clearing.


Responsibility

"No one can accuse me of not having had, since September last year, the usual concern of the need to alert each and everyone who has responsibilities throughout the system to do their part", he stressed.

The area burned in the fires of 2022 was more than triple the area burned in 2021, with rural fires having consumed 109,514 hectares by the end of September, the highest figure since 2017, according to data released in October by the Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests (ICNF).

In a summer in which the drought index was the highest since 2005 and in which high temperatures were recorded, the risk of fire was high, which led the Government to decree in July, for the first time, the situation of calamity across all of mainland Portugal.

The biggest fire of last summer was the one that started on August 6 in the municipality of Covilhã and which reached the Serra da Estrela area over the course of 11 days, having consumed 24,334 hectares of forest.

More than a quarter of the rural fires registered in 2022 originated from arson, being the second most frequent cause after burnings and fires, which represented 41 percent of the total number of causes determined.

According to the document, 8 percent of the fires were due to accidental reasons.