Forest fires across Portuguese municipalities: zones of similar incidence, interactions and benchmarks

Abstract

Every year fires cause several problems and considerable damage to the Portuguese socioeconomic context and to forest resources and activities, despite the significant financial support, from national and European Union budgets, towards prevention. This is an annual scourge that requires multidisciplinary analysis to aid in the design of adjusted firefighting strategies. In this framework, the objective of the study presented here is to investigate if there are Portuguese regions where the incidences of fire, in terms of number of fires and burnt area, are similar, helping toward the creation of firefighting policies in cooperation with neighbouring municipalities. On the other hand, there is a need to understand the interactions of these contexts between the environment and human ecology and finally find municipalities that may be considered as a benchmark for others around them. For this, data from the Statistics Portugal (INE in Several statistics and informations, 2015. https://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ine_base_dados ), for the period 2000–2013, was used and analyzed through descriptive and cross-section techniques and data envelopment analysis (DEA) for the municipalities of Continental Portugal. For the cross-section analysis, the GeoDa (Software. GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation, 2015) software was used considering spatial autocorrelation methodologies and for the DEA the DEAP (DEAP V2.1—a data envelopment analysis (computer) program, 2017. http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/deap.php ) program. The results show that there is spatial autocorrelation across Portuguese municipalities, in the period considered, for the variables considered, which allows for the definition of “regions of similar incidence” for which similar policies can be designed, namely those promoting cooperation among neighbouring municipalities. In turn, some municipalities may be considered as benchmarks inside zones of similar incidence.