Question

What are the biocultural and environmental issues as it relates to the Polish heritage?

Answer 1

Bio-cultural heritage is a complex system of inter-reliant parts focused on the correlation between Indigenous peoples and their natural environment. Its components include biological resources, from the genetic to the landscape level; and long standing traditions, practices and knowledge for adaptation to environmental change and sustainable use of biodiversity.

It includes thousands of traditional crop and livestock varieties, medicinal plants, wild foods and wild crop relatives. These precious resources have been conserved, domesticated and improved by communities over generations for the welfare of society and its culture in true sense.

Poland is popularized by an extremely rich nature and landscape resources worldwide. The fact that Poland is famous as natural habitat for rare species on Europe-wide scale makes it particularly responsible for the protection of natural heritage.

It is studied that about 32.5% of the territory of Poland is protected in one way or another, usually related to natural or scenic importance.

Hence there is need of cultural heritage protection, such as cultural landscape, cultural route, heritage corridor, heritage canal, which presents the development of people's recognition of cultural heritage.

Poland has undergone constant and intensive economic growth during the last two decades based on above mentioned resources.

Therefore one of the major challenges is to achieve sustainable development through such growth and environmental protection requirements including:

·         National Development Strategy emphasizing on a sustainable development scenario

·         Energy security and the environment strategy interlinking quality of life and state of environment with the sustainable development of the energy sector, the energy security of Poland as well as the effectiveness and competitiveness of the Polish economy;

·         Conduction of National Programme for the Development of Low-Emission Economy considering improvement of energy- and resource-efficiency, waste prevention and better waste management, and promotion of new consumption patterns.

·         Efficient Implementation of National Waste Management Plan

The Polish National Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change by 2020 aims to ensure sustainable development and the efficient functioning of the economy and society in a changing climate.

Furthermore Heritage protection also concerns a great number of issues lying outside the scope of purely technical, architectural, and urban matters.

It emphasize on issues of sustainable development, relations with stakeholders, environment, etc.

It is therefore difficult to keep all these aspects in balance in teaching architecture and heritage protection.

The critical issues include: –

·         Protection of historic monuments and sites – the legal basis

·         Adaptation of properties of historical significance to contemporary uses –

·         Revitalization of historic areas –

·         New development in historic areas.

·         Conservation of the historic green wedge-ring system

·         Conservation of green space as part of the cultural heritage.

So the above mentioned critical issues should be considered on wide scale for significant for sustainability of biocultural and environmental state of Polish heritage.

At the last it is advisable that the Environmental Protection Programmes should be conducted and implemented with public participation involving government and non-governmental agencies at the same time as the need of era.