Environmental and Energy Conditions in Sustainable Regional Development

Brygida Klemens (), Brygida Solga, Krystian Heffner and Piotr Gibas
Additional contact information
Brygida Klemens: Faculty of Economics and Management, Opole University of Technology, 45-036 Opole, Poland
Brygida Solga: Faculty of Economics and Management, Opole University of Technology, 45-036 Opole, Poland
Krystian Heffner: Faculty of Economics, University of Economics in Katowice, 40-287 Katowice, Poland
Piotr Gibas: Faculty of Economics, University of Economics in Katowice, 40-287 Katowice, Poland

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 15, 1-26

Abstract: Climate change is taking place on a global scale and it is substantially affected by human activity, including increasing greenhouse gas emissions. One of the thematic objectives of EU’s new financial objective is a more environmentally friendly low-emission Europe that promotes clean and fair energy transformation, green investments, and a circular economy, among others. The Polish economy is mainly based on energy production from conventional sources (fossil fuels). Considering that the demand for electricity in Poland is predicted to increase by as much as 50% until 2040, it is necessary to take action aimed at increasing the share of renewable energy sources. The subject of analysis is the Opolskie Voivodeship (a NUTS 2 type region), the capital of which features the biggest Polish coal power plant. In 2014–2019, it was expanded by two units with 1800 MW in total capacity, thereby indicating that investments in energy obtained from conventional sources are still implemented and to a large extent at that (the expansion has been the biggest infrastructural investment in Poland since 1989). The Opolskie region is characterised by substantial excess in acceptable environmental burden (dust pollution, among others). The aim of the paper is to evaluate the key environmental conditions for the Opolskie region’s development in terms of the assumptions of the domestic and EU energy policies. The Opolskie region’s developmental challenges in the environmental area were determined on the basis of selected indicator estimations up to 2030. The research hypothesis assumes that the environmental conditions for the Opolskie region’s development are unfavourable. The methodological part features an analysis of the cause and effect dependencies in the “environment” area, which enabled an assessment of the Opolskie Voivodeship’s current situation as well as an analysis of the dependencies relevant to the region’s development. This was followed by an estimation of selected indicators in the “environment” area until 2030, which allowed for an assessment of their probable levels and thereby a specification of the region’s development conditions. The estimation was conducted using the data available in public statistics, i.e., Statistics Poland’s data. The indicators estimated for 2030 were presented using three forecasting methods: (a) the monotonic trend, (b) the yearly average change rate, and (c) the logarithmic trend.

Keywords: region development; environmental conditions; air pollution; renewable energy; energy policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/15/5758/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/15/5758/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:15:y:2022:i:15:p:5758-:d:883278

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().