Annual Report 2022 by CTIF President Milan Dubravac
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This report was held as a speech by CTIF President Milan Dubravac during Delegates Assembly in Celje, Slovenia, on July 20th, 2022, and covers some of the main CTIF activities and achievements since our last Delegates Assembly in October of 2021.
Dear colleagues,
The year which is now behind us was still marked by the consequences of the pandemic, but it was also turbulent due to the known circumstances in Europe.
The work of most commissions and working groups has slowly returned to pre-pandemic levels. There are still certain problems, but I think that in the past year, CTIF as an organization is working back to normal again and serves the basic purpose of sharing knowledge and experience among firefighters in the member states.
As we can witness, also during this week when the firefighting sports games are held here in Slovenia with good participation.
This year, for the second year in a row, we have also decided to organize a hybrid delegate assembly with the aim of also including the participation of countries that could not physically attend the meeting.
The executive committee, which manages the organization between the annual assemblies, was also extremely active last year. In the past year, we met 17 times online and twice physically. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the EC members for their active work during the year.
In March, members of the executive board also visited the European Commissioner for Crisis Management and Humanitarian Aid to discuss cooperation between the CTIF and the EU. Meeting was very constructive and in the future CTIF can have also important role in some activities within EU.
We also continued with the 'Fire, Rescue & New Challenges' seminars. In April, we organized a webinar with interesting topics in the field of climate change and its impact on our work. Among others, our new member Canada actively participated in the webinar with interesting presentations. The webinar was well attended and we will continue with this method of knowledge exchange in the future.
CTIF also responded actively to the Ukraine war. As an organization, we offered to share all requests for aid to Ukraine and informed our members about the possibility of connections regarding the aid itself.
Together with the Secretary General, I also met virtually with the leadership of the Ukrainian fire brigade, where they presented the situation and activities, as well as the types of help they need. On this occasion, they also expressed their intention to join CTIF as a full member.
We also responded to the events in Ukraine with a special statement regarding the firefighting associations of Russia and Belarus. The statement was published on the website.
As a result of all these events, our work was focused on the future challenges that await our organization. The Executive Board decided to establish a new 'Strategic & Scientific Oversight Commission'. It is a commission whose task will be to support other commissions in the scientific field. The commission will also follow the upcoming challenges and decide on the strategic steps of our organization in the future. I think that this approach is good because in the future, for example, in the field of climate changes and energy transition, we will not run out of challenges.
Agreements with other organizations to cooperate, so called Memorandums Of Understanding, MOUs: In the coming year, we plan to renew some previous agreements that have expired. We will also be open to similar collaborations in the future.
Cooperation with both the Ordinary members and the Associate members in between the annual Delegate's Assemblies is very important. CTIF should always remember that the National Committees are the real decision-makers in CTIF, but also those who can distribute knowledge and start activities in our member countries. Strong National Committees means strong CTIF and that we are aware of. Therefore we intend to increase this cooperation in the future.
We also had some contacts with other countries such as India, Senegal, Peru, Montenegro. We are planning some more activities in other countries with the aim of informing them about our work and possible membership in the future.
In the past year we also worked on improving our website, www.ctif.org. I think our website at the moment is very useful and user friendly. We followed the goal that information you can find on our page can be useful for each firefighter. Recently our webpage became three lingual. At the moment you can reach content on our page in English, French and German. In the future we will continue with the extension of languages.
Finally I want to thank everybody for great work, the colleagues in EC, the National Committees, the Commissions and working groups, the CTIF Office, the Associated Members and everybody else who has been working hard for a better CTIF.
Milan Dubravac
President CTIF