Thank you very much.

Good afternoon. My name is Klaus Buchmüller. I have been the head of the international division of THW since 2006 and a member of THW since 1986. Thank you very much for the invitation to discuss Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief, THW.

I know that, in a previous session, Eva Cohen, a former THW member and our liaison to Canada, already explained that the German government has a disaster relief mechanism that allows the German armed forces to be the asset of last resort, and THW’s unique structure as a government agency based on unpaid citizen volunteers.

There are 85,000 trained volunteers, including about 15,000 youth volunteers, in about 700 detachments across the country, with only 2% being paid staff, one of those being me. Most of them are located on the regional level. In the fire service, there are 1.1 million volunteer firefighters, and only 20,000 paid firefighters. There are approximately 400,000 volunteer paramedics and about 40,000 paid paramedics.

In my position, I have witnessed a steady increase in disaster impact over the last 15 years, as well as an increase of the requirements for effective disaster relief and the technical capabilities that go with it, both within Germany as well as globally. The collaboration of civil protection actors across borders is increasing for heightened efficiency, with the EU mechanism being a very good example. Currently, the ASEAN countries are examining a systematic approach to capacity building and co-operation that is similar to the EU mechanism. Aside from that, we are now supporting a growing list of countries that have decided to strengthen their disaster response systems and that have recognized the benefits of a citizen-based or citizen-supported approach like ours.

Climate change and the resulting increase of extreme weather events have led to an unprecedented level of THW deployments within Germany in recent years. Most notable is the Ahrtal flooding in July 2021. I'm sitting about 10 kilometres away from the Ahrtal.

We were heavily involved in supporting all levels of government with pandemic response, with tasks such as the installation of test and vaccination centres; the transport of personal protection equipment, medications, etc.; as well as international civil protection, capacity-building missions in Jordan, in Tunisia, in northern Iraq, in Algeria, in Morocco, in Ukraine for the procurement and transport of equipment for different stakeholders, in Lebanon for urban search and rescue after the explosion at a chemical warehouse, and in Mozambique for water purification and drinking water supply after the cyclone.

Catastrophic flooding occurred at the Ahr river due to severe rainfall of more than 300 litres per hour for 25 hours ongoing. It was, more or less, 48 hours. This resulted in the biggest deployment of THW in its 70-year history. Alongside all other actors—the NGO sector, spontaneous private supporters and the German military as the asset of last resort—THW volunteers from all 700 detachments across the country were rotated as surge capacity, and all of our 25 technical all-hazards capabilities from urban search and rescue, water purification, blasting, bridge building, and emergency infrastructure repair were required. The operation lasted about 16 weeks, with more than 15,000 volunteers from our organization plus a lot of the other organizations. THW operated for about 2.4 million hours in this scenario.

Although you can imagine that many new lessons were learned, it was also a strong confirmation that our system works very well and can easily adapt and scale up to any demand on a catastrophic level.

It’s an honour to be here today, and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you.