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Poland Government Environmental Policy
Poland established a Ministry of Environmental
Protection and
Natural Resources in 1985, but the new department exerted
little
authority. Between 1987 and 1988, for example, government
investment in environmental protection increased by only 6
percent. In 1990 the initial postcommunist environmental
timetable was to achieve "substantial" reduction of
extreme
environmental hazards in three years and to reach the
level of European Community
(EC--see Glossary)
requirements in
seven to
ten years. In early 1991, the ministry drafted a new state
ecological policy, the core of which eliminated the
communist
rationale of "social interest" in the arbitrary
consumption of
natural resources. Instead, the new policy fixed
responsibility
for the negative results of resource consumption at the
source.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural
Resources
officially identified the eighty enterprises causing the
most
pollution and promised to shut them down if pollution were
not
reduced. The role of nongovernmental environmental
organizations
in policy making was recognized officially for the first
time. In
late 1991, a State Environmental Protection Inspectorate
was
established, with broad powers to regulate polluting
industries.
Penalties for environmental damage also were increased at
that
time.
At the same time, government policy steered carefully
away
from measures that would sacrifice economic development,
and
policy makers debated the appropriate standards for
comparing
immediate economic growth with the estimated longer term
gains of
beginning a rigorous cleanup program. Accordingly, in 1990
the
Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources
adopted a policy of "ecodevelopment" emphasizing
modernization
and restructuring measures that theoretically would
curtail
pollution while they streamlined production operations.
The
policy included distribution of information to the public
to gain
acceptance of economic sacrifice for environmental
improvement;
linkage of environmental law to the new market mechanism
slowly
being created; promotion of an awareness in Western Europe
of the
transnational impact of Poland's air and water pollution;
and
application of foreign capital and technology to
environmental
cleanup problems. At the end of 1990, Western banks began
opening
credit lines for Polish environmental protection, and
plans for
some multinational ecological enterprises included Poland.
In
1991 the United States government agreed to forgive part
of
Poland's debt in exchange for domestic investment in
pollution
control.
Data as of October 1992
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