In August 2022, Pavel Vulfin's farm in the Serra da Estrela mountains burned in a wildfire that consumed an area larger than the city of Lisbon. He received no personalised warning. The actionable information he needed — in English — did not exist.
The new app Riska, launched last month, fills a long-standing gap in English-language fire-season information for foreign and Portuguese residents alike.
That gap is now Riska, a free, bilingual community risk intelligence platform for natural hazards in Portugal, available since 22 June 2026 across iOS, Android and web.
Riska pulls verified data from ANEPC (Portugal's national civil protection authority), IPMA (the national meteorology institute), ICNF (the forest and conservation institute), Copernicus and NASA FIRMS into one calm, source-transparent interface. Every fact carries its source and timestamp.
The platform launches with four features that distinguish it from existing tools:
- Bilingual from architecture, not translation. Every screen, every alert, every guide in both Portuguese and English.
- Personal-place alerts. Users save the places that matter — home, quinta, family property — and Riska notifies them when something starts nearby. Official channels broadcast district-wide; Riska answers "does this affect me, specifically?"
- Bilingual prepare and recover guides plus checklists. Family evacuation plan and backpack checklist, defensible space, the período crítico rules, understanding the IPMA fire-danger index, junta registration, insurance claims, post-fire state aid, village meeting points and collective shelters, and mental health support — information currently scattered across dozens of government sites, mostly Portuguese-only, now consolidated and translated into one place.
- Daily "Posso queimar hoje?" check. A consolidated answer to Portugal's complex outdoor burning rules — which differ by district, period, and weather conditions and have, until now, required residents to assemble the answer themselves.
A founder built from inside the problem
Vulfin, who lives in the Guarda region near the Serra da Estrela, spent the two years following the 2022 fire as a member of a local fire-prevention association. He worked alongside bombeiros (volunteer firefighters), juntas de freguesia (local councils), and rural communities across central Portugal.
"The system failed me in 2022," Vulfin says. "It also fails the foreign residents and Portuguese neighbours I've spent the last two years working alongside. Riska is what I wish had existed when my farm burned — and what the volunteers and community workers around me have been quietly building bridges for, in their spare time and out of their ownpockets, for years."
A deliberately calm response to a panic-prone topic
Wildfire information in Portugal has historically been delivered through alarming headlines, district-wide broadcasts, and content engineered to drive urgent attention. Riska takes the opposite editorial stance: present multiple indicators side by side, show source and timestamp on every fact, and let people reach their own informed conclusions rather than respond to single-data-point alarm.
"The country's relationship with fire is serious enough on its own," Vulfin says. "It does not need to be made more frightening for engagement. People deserve to see several indicators — fire danger today, heat forecast three days from now, official source verification — side by side, not just the most alarming one. Calm is not the opposite of urgent. It is how you stay useful when something is actually happening."
Filling a documented gap
Portugal has consistently ranked among the worst-affected countries in Western Europe for wildfires. The June 2017 Pedrógão Grande fire and the October 2017 fires together killed 117 people. The August 2022 fires across the Serra da Estrela and other central regions burned an area larger than the city of Lisbon.
Portugal hosts a significant foreign-resident population, with concentrations in the Algarve interior, central Portugal, and the Alentejo — regions historically exposed to severe fire seasons. Until now, no consumer-facing tool has combined English-language access to ANEPC and IPMA data with personalised place-based alerts and bilingual preparation and recovery guides.
"Riska is not a government service," Vulfin notes. "It is a supplementary awareness tool. It respects 112 and the official channels, and it adds the personal-place and bilingual layers they don't have the mandate or capacity to build."
Available now
Riska is available free across iOS and Android app stores, and the web at riska.app as of 22 June 2026.
Safety-critical features remain free during the pilot, with no ads and no data sold. The platform launches with coverage of mainland Portugal and architecture built for multi-hazard, multi-country expansion.
