Poland currently failing to meet virtually any climate target
23:11
The European Union is devoting significant resources to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. In the next few years, Poland may receive as much as €30 billion from the EU reconstruction fund in non-returnable grants alone. We will get the second as much as part of loans. The grants themselves will account for about 6 percent of Polish GDP, and their issuance should increase our GDP by 3-4 percentage points. Despite the delay, work is already underway on the National Reconstruction Plan – which is to be delivered to Brussels in the first quarter of this year. Thanks to this, we will receive grants and we will be able to start spending EU money. Of course, this should be done according to the rules. What will the received funds be used for? Probably the largest funding will go to offshore wind energy – followed by other segments such as photovoltaics. This is a very important element of the reconstruction plan, while as many as 20-30 percent of international corporations want to cooperate with partners who rely on a clean energy mix. So we need to show the path to cleaner energy to attract as many of these investments as possible.
"One-third of the funds are to be spent on digital transformation, one-third on transformation towards renewable energy sources and reducing CO2 emissions. The rest may be spent on other structural goals. From the first statements of politicians, it can be concluded that a very important element of the Polish reconstruction plan will still be hard infrastructure: roads, ring roads, and railways," Rafał Benecki, chief economist of ING Bank Śląski, told eNewsroom.
"In addition, there will be significant funds for the digitization of health care and other elements of public administration. A large amount will be spent on changing Poland's energy model. At the moment, Poland does not meet virtually any climate target. The result is more expensive energy and declining competitiveness of the Polish economy. However, it is clear that a lot of EU funds will be spent in the short term – to achieve a quick economic recovery. And the preparation of projects that will give supply effects for the economy and increase competitiveness requires much more time. I think that too much attention will be paid to the speed of spending, and not necessarily the quality of these projects, and the long-term benefit of these measures may suffer," Benecki predicts.
