This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Across southern Europe, increasingly extreme heat, wildfire and intense rainfall are forcing planners to consider how one event can alter the risk of the next. Portugal's exceptionally wet winter and another summer of wildfire risk are an example of this.
As a professor of architecture and climate change adaptation who has been following the cyclical nature of weather extremes in the Pinhal Interior region since the deadly 2017 fires, I explain why prevention must connect forests, settlements, slopes and waterways. Portugal, Spain and France have spent another summer confronting severe wildfires. But in Portugal, the story began months before the flames.
February 2026 was the country's wettest February in 47 years. Across much of mainland Portugal, rainfall reached three to four times the normal monthly amount. Successive Atlantic storms saturated soils, caused flooding and brought down trees across central Portugal.
That water also favored vegetation growth. Research in Mediterranean climates has found a counterintuitive relationship: A rainy growing season can increase fine vegetation that later becomes fuel once summer heat dries it out. A very wet period does not necessarily mean a lower fire risk several months later—and fire is not the only hazard that the same rainfall from storms was quietly setting up.
Together with an NGO and my university colleagues, I have been following Portugal's Pinhal Interior since 2017, when the Pedrógão Grande wildfire killed 66 people, many while trying to escape by road. Four months later, another devastating wave of fires killed around 50 people. Disaster risk is commonly understood through a simple relationship: Risk = Hazard × Exposure × Vulnerability.
We cannot eliminate extreme heat, wildfire or heavy rainfall. Planning can, however, alter how exposed and vulnerable people and landscapes are. Portugal has made progress since 2017.
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