Umweltschutzrecht in Polen

Abstract

The analyzed thirty years of development of environmental law begin with the economic transformation of the country. This article treats this topic as a point of reference. In the first part of the article, the development of environmental law in Poland was presented by distinguishing time periods. The accession to the European Union has led to a rapprochement of Polish legislation with the EU, but the period that elapsed between the change of the political system and the accession to the EU was too short to catch up with the significant backlog in environmental protection. The second part of the article presents the development of the doctrine of environmental law. Among many considerations, one of the basic ones is to find the place of environmental law in the system of Polish law. The next part - the shortest one - presents the structure of the environmental protection public authorities. In its essential core, it was shaped in the 90 s. In this period, the division of tasks in environmental protection into governmental and self-governmental took place. In the subsequent years, authorities dealing with environmental impact assessment and nature protection were separated. The last change concerned the bodies of water protection. The last issue discussed in the paper concerns current problems in environmental protection. The main challenge is the quality of air - despite fairly extensive legal instruments, the improvement is insufficient. Polish policy on climate change is still burdened with historical negligence. Basing the energy sector on coal-fired installations, even if the share of RES in energy production increases, makes the transformation difficult. This part ends waste management issue. Here, too, the landfilling - a basic principle of waste management before the transition period, has changed significantly, but again the pace of change is too slow.