Sapadores Florestais — Portugal's Salaried Forest-Fire Fuel-Management Corps

Portugal's wildfire crisis - most visibly the 2017 fires that killed over 100 people - pushed the national government to scale up its long-running Sapadores Florestais (Forest Sapper) programme, run by the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF), which employs salaried five-person crews year-round to reduce wildfire fuel loads rather than relying only on seasonal firefighting.
As of August 2019, more than 400 teams were operating nationwide, with a further 40 teams (a €2.6 million investment) approved to bring the total to 500 teams and roughly 2,500 personnel; each three-team brigade must cover at least 7,500 hectares (or, for forest-only teams, at least 2,500 hectares), giving the country a mapped, government-funded fuel-management network rather than an ad hoc one. The programme's 2011-2020 performance was the subject of an official evaluation, and the wider National Integrated Rural Fire Management System into which it is embedded has an interim evaluation underway with a final one due by 2031 - meaning the reduction in burned area specifically attributable to the sapadores network is not yet independently quantified.
Because that outcome evaluation is still pending, the strongest evidence available today is operational - team numbers, funding, legally mandated coverage - rather than proven fire-reduction impact; C-NAPSE scores the practice accordingly on governance and deployment scale.

Read the full analysis: https://www.icnf.pt/florestas/gfr/sapadoresflorestais