Public funding constrains effective postfire emergency restoration in Portugal

In the last decades, fire regimes in Europe have changed toward an increased occurrence of extreme fire events with large burned areas and associated impacts. Portugal is one of the countries most affected by wildfires, with extraordinary negative impacts. Postfire emergency stabilization is an important restoration practice to mitigate fire impacts in the short term. The present study aims to improve understanding of how public funding processes affect the efficiency of postfire emergency stabilization in Portugal. We analyzed the process of public funding for postfire emergency stabilization in 2009-2018 using data from public reports assessing the needs for interventions (147), open calls resulting from those reports (12), and implementation projects subsidized by the calls (517). Our results show that available funding through calls for postfire emergency stabilization responded to the needs assessed by previous reports, but there was no available funding (reports and calls) for many (37%) of the large burned areas (>1,000 ha) in 2009-2018. Furthermore, the effectiveness of public funding for postfire emergency stabilization in Portugal is limited by the financial model, lack of eligibility of relevant treatments, the constant change of calls criteria, and slow decision-making and execution that exceeds the optimal timeframe. As a consequence, implementation of postfire emergency stabilization within an optimal timeframe is halted by insufficient financial capacity of private beneficiaries. We discuss effective funding mechanisms from other countries and suggest improvements for the funding process in Portugal.