Due to economic transformation in the early 1990s, Poland’s emissions fell from 475 MtCO₂e/yr in 1990 to 396 MtCO₂e/yr in 2000. Afterwards they remained steady with emissions in 2018 slightly above the 2000 levels. Between 1990 and 2019, Poland’s emissions fell by 17%, much less than the overall drop in the EU’s emissions of almost 26%, with the bulk of reductions taking place prior to 2000.

In 2018, Poland’s power sector (with accompanied heat generation) was responsible for almost 40% of the country’s GHG emissions. While emissions from transport constituted a much smaller share of 16%, there is a continued upward trend in the emissions from this sector, which has already tripled from the 1990 emission levels.

Implementation of current policies will result in emissions increasing by 3% in the 2020s from 2019 levels, mainly driven by the transport sector, with emissions from the power sector remaining stagnant.¹

¹ European Environmental Agency. Trends and projections in Europe 2020 – Tracking progress towards Europe’s climate and energy targets. (2020).

² Ministerstwo Klimatu i Środowiska. Polityka energetyczna Polski do 2040 r. (2021).

³ European Commission. Stepping up Europe’s 2030 climate ambition. Investing in a climate-neutral future for the benefit of our people. (2020).

⁴ Forum Energii. Energy transition in Poland | 2022 Edition. forum-energii.eu/en/analizy/transformacja-2022 (2022).

⁵ Eurostat. Gross inland consumption. (2021).

⁶ Ancygier, A. Misfit of Interests instead of the “Goodness of Fit”? Implementation of European Directives 2001/77/EC and 2009/28/EC in Poland. (Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2013).

⁷ NIK. Rozwój Sektora Odnawialnych Źródeł Energii. (2017).

⁸ European Council. Conclusions of the European Council meeting on 12 December 2019. (2019).

⁹ Eurostat. Population on 1st January by age, sex and type of projection. (2021).

¹⁰ European Environment Agency. EEA greenhouse gas – data viewer. (2021).

¹¹ ACEA. Interactive map – CO2 emissions from new passenger cars in the EU, by country. ACEA. (2021).

¹² ACEA. Vehicles in use in Europe 2022. (2022).

¹³ Ministry of Climate. Polityka energetyczna Polski do 2040 r. (2020).

¹⁴ LULUCF sinks assumed are based on the current levels provide by the EEA: -36 MtCO₂e in 2018.¹⁰

¹⁵ While global cost-effective pathways assessed by the IPCC Special Report 1.5°C provide useful guidance for an upper-limit of emissions trajectories for developed countries, they underestimate the feasible space for such countries to reach net zero earlier. The current generation of models tend to depend strongly on land-use sinks outside of currently developed countries and include fossil fuel use well beyond the time at which these could be phased out, compared to what is understood from bottom-up approaches. The scientific teams which provide these global pathways constantly improve the technologies represented in their models – and novel CDR technologies are now being included in new studies focused on deep mitigation scenarios meeting the Paris Agreement. A wide assessment database of these new scenarios is not yet available; thus, we rely on available scenarios which focus particularly on BECCS as a net-negative emission technology. Accordingly, we do not yet consider land-sector emissions (LULUCF) and other CDR approaches which developed countries will need to implement in order to counterbalance their remaining emissions and reach net zero GHG are not considered here due to data availability.

¹⁶ Calculated based on Annex to the Poland’s Energy Policy Until 2040, table 28 and historic emissions data for 1990 from the European Environment Agency.^10,13

¹⁷ In some of the analysed pathways, the power sector assumes already a certain amount of carbon dioxide removal technologies, in this case bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).