Abstract
The main goal of the paper is to verify the impact of the absorption of European Union (EU) grants on land cover changes in Polish municipalities in the years 2012–2018. The selection of the research area was justified by the fact that Poland is the largest and significantly spatially differentiated transition economy in Central-Eastern Europe, recognised as a substantial beneficiary of EU accession in 2004. The time range of analysis was set as the result of a comparison of data availability in Corine Land Cover (CLC) and Statistics Poland. The CLC dataset referring to land cover and land use changes between 2012 and 2018 was used. The focus on modifications taking place within one of the main land cover groups at level 3 of detail was applied in this research. These changes were analysed as percentages referring to the area of the municipality and to the total area of changes in the investigated period. Two categories of EU grants were considered: total and infrastructural (granted under EU Operational Programme “Infrastructure and Environment”). Moreover, some control economic, social, demographic, institutional, infrastructural, and environmental variables were applied to better explain land cover changes. Moran’s local statistic was employed to detect spatial hot-spots of EU grants absorption, as well as hot-spots of land cover changes. Then, a collection of various variables related to determinants of land cover changes was set. Economic factors, including EU grants absorption, as well as factors related to accessibility, agrarian structure, demography, environment, and spatial planning were investigated. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed to convert the set of all considered variables into a set of few uncorrelated predictors. Finally, Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) was applied to describe the spatially varied impact of investigated determinants, including EU grants, represented by estimated principal components on land cover changes.
Highlights
The main purpose of this research is to identify the impact of spatially varying absorption of European Union (EU) funds on land cover changes in Polish municipalities in the years 2012–2018
Four areas of significant land cover changes need to distinguished: highly forested and relatively sparsely populated area extending from Lubusz Lake District to Central Pomerania in the north-west part of Poland, Podlaskie characterised by similar attributes, located in the north-east, the metropolitan area of Wrocław in the south-west, and the mountain region of Beskid Slaski and Beskid Zywiecki in the south
Few clusters of very limited land cover changes were identified: the large rural area extending from Chełmno Lake District to the west part of Masovia region, the east part of Masovia, and few clusters located in the south-east of Poland, mainly in the region of Kielce, Kraków, Lublin, and Rzeszów
Summary
The main purpose of this research is to identify the impact of spatially varying absorption of EU funds on land cover changes in Polish municipalities in the years 2012–2018. The absorption of EU funds and its impact on the economic growth and convergence of the regions has already been widely discussed in literature [15,16,17,18]. There have been several important studies reviewing the effectiveness of EU funds in different regions of Poland [21,22,23,24]. These studies do not put appropriate emphasis on the interrelation between the absorption of the EU funds and land cover or land use changes
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