Originally from the Portuguese Association of Firefighters and Specialist Technicians (APBTE), today called PAFO (Portuguese Association of Fire Officers) - Lusophone Association for the Prevention of Incidents, Accidents and Disasters is an association that assists movements for a modern citizenship and brings together professionals, academics, thinkers and bold minds who devote their time to preventing incidents, accidents and disasters, from all Portuguese speaking countries.

The need to improve aid and support for victims and to combat accidents and natural disasters was significantly changed, and even in 2017, people's expectations regarding their heritage and the forest were neglected.

The quantity, variety and intensity of today's extreme environmental phenomena, with serious repercussions on the dynamics of society, requires us to reflect deeply on the reason for the existence of this association, forcing us to take an integrated and transversal action with civil society, focused on on the importance of life, goods and nature:

• We believe that the current structure of firefighters is not prepared to solve the problems of aggravating and intensifying extreme phenomena in the future;
• We believe that in order to create a battle front in the prevention and / or mitigation of our vulnerabilities and if we want to effectively anticipate and prevent the incident, disaster or calamity, then we will have to mobilize the entire civil society - from school to the elderly - and prevention agents: modern citizenship does not have exclusion clauses;
• We believe in management, concept validation and dynamization of academic knowledge thinking, for a good training of agents and society in general.

This is our mission.