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//-->M. FeltynowskiGLLGeomatics, Landmanagement and Landscape No. 3•2015, 45–52tHe CHAnGe In tHe Forest LAnd sHAre InCoMMUnes tHreAtened BY sUBUrBAnIsAtIonAnd tHe sUstAInABLe deVeLoPMent PrInCIPLeMarcin FeltynowskiSummaryThe aim of the paper is to examine the scale of the depletion of forest lands in the areas border-ing on the capitals of Polish voivodeships. The analysis of the communes around studied urbancentres allows for the assessment of the local governments’ spatial development policy with ref-erence to forest lands. The paper shows how local authorities prevent these lands from disap-pearing and how closely this task is related to the usage of the spatial information instrumentssuch as land use plans (spatial development plans).In the paper the index of the loss of forest land has been used. It estimates the percentage of theforest land that constitutes forest land intended for deforestation in land use plans with referenceto the total area of forest land registered in a commune in 2013. Out of the 148 communes thatborder on capitals of voivodeships only 34 were qualified for the research, namely those withindex of forest land depletion higher than its average value for Poland. One of the conclusions ofthe research is that areas particularly threatened by the loss of forest lands are those that borderon Warsaw, Łódź and Lublin.Keywordsland use plan • forest land • change in the use of forest area • forest land loss indicator • urbansprawl • sustainable development1. IntroductionIn recent years Polish urban agglomerations are undergoing constant changes in thestructure of land use. As the European Environment Agency (EEA) indicated in itsreport of 2006, in the last twenty years the built-up areas in many European countriesincreased by 20%, whereas the population grew only by 6% [EEA 2006]. The growingurbanisation is a direct effect of urban sprawl or in other words of the interferencein landscape with no link to the increase of population. The growth of cities to theiradjacent areas leads to: the emergence of low density populated areas, the divisionof commercial and residential services and work place, insufficient quality of roadnetwork to newly urbanized areas and the dominance of car transport [Ewing et al.46M. Feltynowski2002]. Uncontrolled growth of cities is equivalent to their incoherent current growthresulting from the development of private transportation and the motivation of moreand more people to have a semi-detached or a detached house in suburban areas.As the literature on this subject suggests, the uncontrolled growth of cities influencesthe surrounding landscape in that it leads to excessive use of forest and agricultural landand green areas [Brueckner 2001, CASA 2002, Travisi and Camagni 2005, EEA 2006].The pressure on the areas surrounding the city centres means that indicators for assess-ment of suburbanisation processes have to be identified. Some of the indicators arecreated to show the suburbanisation impact on forest or agricultural land use [Hasseand Lathrop 2003, Rudel at al. 2005] and they help in the implementation of fact-basedpolicies. The spatial development policy based on facts can give an accurate assessmentof whether the area should be implemented with new functions by the local authorities.By using statistical data together with expertise one can judge if the changes in landuse result directly from the social-economic changes in a commune (gmina) or if theyare a part of greenfield development policy favouring urban sprawl. Scientific analysesshould become a foundation for local authorities and a base for taking right decisionsthat ensure that communes develop in a sustainable way and help in environmentalplanning.The negative phenomena in the urban areas are a consequences of the fact thatthe administrative boundaries no longer reflect the physical, social, economic, culturaland environmental conditions of development of the cities, which means that localauthorities of the adjacent communes must react and change their attitude when itcomes to management of the basic units of territorial division [Unia Europejska 2011].Unconstrained urbanisation in the areas surrounding the biggest cities in Poland hasan undeniable impact on the social, economic, spatial, cultural and environmentalspheres [Bieńkowska 2013]. As to the latter, it needs to be emphasized that the core’sinfluence on the surroundings is also linked to the impact on the landscape of therural and urban-rural communes or towns bordering on major cities [Wójcik 2006,Mrozik et al. 2012, Wójcik 2013a, b, Kowalewski 2013, Mrozik and Wiśniewska 2013],which in many cases runs counter to the idea of sustainable development. Imposingrestriction on urban sprawl must be implemented in the form of deliberate actions oflocal authorities and consist in well thought-out urbanisation of not built-up areas andfocus on already developed areas and places defined in the local law as building sites[Bieńkowska 2013].The aim of the article is to examine the problem of shrinking forest lands in the areasbordering on the capital of the voivodeships. Thanks to the analysis of communes situ-ated around these urban agglomerations it will be possible to assess the spatial policyof local authorities with regard to forest lands. It will also be a chance to verify whetherin territorial units threatened by the pressure of the centre the indicators of forest landdepletion are similar to or differ from the mean values noted in Poland. The article willallow the reader to judge how successful commune authorities are in counteractingthe depletion of forest resources and thus in adhering to the principle of sustainabledevelopment, which means sticking to the directions of local land use planning.GLL No. 3•2015THE CHANGE IN THE FOREST LAND SHARE IN COMMUNES THREATENED...472. Forest lands and land use planningRegardless of the legal and administrative status of a commune adjacent to the city onecan expect an increased demand for building plots and the pressure to transformingagricultural and forest areas into building ones. In spite of the principle – introducedby the Concept of National Spatial Planning 2030 – of limiting the urban sprawl, thereis no visible influence of that law on the Polish landscape [KPZK 2011]. Similarly,the local authorities seem to care little about the regulations introduced by the Act of3 February 1995 on the protection of agricultural and forest lands, which states clearlythat the change of the use of forest lands to non-forest purposes takes place by the localspatial development plan. The regulations impose the obligation to obtain necessarypermissions depending on the ownership of forest lands. If the lands are the propertyof the State Treasury the permission of land use must be consented by the Minister ofthe Environment or an official authorized by him. It is done after gaining the approvalof the Marshall of the Voivodeship, which is to be proceeded by getting the opinion ofthe chamber of agriculture. When state-owned lands are concerned, a city’s mayor isobliged to obtain the opinion of a director of Regional Directorates of State Forests, andif the lands in questions are part of national parks – the opinion of the park’s director isobligatory [Feltynowski 2015].In communes the instrument of spatial planning are the local spatial developmentplans. In principle the plans are non-obligatory documents. The plans, being a part ofthe local law, must be consistent with the principle of sustainable development andbe helpful in implementing the idea of spatial order. The cores of metropolitan areasand urban agglomerations have indirect influence on neighbouring communes, whichsometimes means that land use plans must be worked-out in order to protect biologi-cally active areas from anthropogenic impact on the environment of the local popu-lation and settlers. In accordance with the applicable Polish law the actions of localauthorities can effect the resources that the commune has. One of these resources areforest lands. Their deforestation can take place exclusively on the basis of provisionsof the local land use plans. When legal regulations are taken into account, it should benoted that the mean depletion of forest land in 2013 in Poland was equal to 0.7% of allforest lands.3. the research area and methodsThe choice of the examined communes that border on the cities being the core ofagglomerations results from the fact that these areas are threatened by anthropogenicimpact on the environment related to neighbourhood of a big city. The communeschosen for examination consist of the ring of units that have common border with thecentre and thus communes of diverse legal and administrative status can be includedin this group.The research materials concerning two operational areas of local government units– spatial planning and forest lands – come from the Local Data Bank (BDL) of theGeomatics, Landmanagement and Landscape No. 3•201548M. FeltynowskiCentral Statistical Office (GUS) and are for the year 2013, because the statistical dataare accessible with one and a half year delay.In the analysis a forest land depletion indicator has been created to assess what isthe share of forest lands identified in local land use plans intended for deforestation[Feltynowski 2015]. The indicator was used to evaluate the attitude of local authoritiesto forest lands and to verify the problem in the studied group together with the type ofcommunes that border on the voivodeships’ capitals.In 2013 there were 148 communes that bordered directly on eighteen voivodeships’capitals. Out of these communes 23 were urban communes, 33 rural-urban and 92rural. Only one of them – the rural commune Koniusza, bordering on Kraków, had noland use plan. Among those analysed territorial units 44.6% had zoning plans coveringmore than 50% of their areas and 23 of them (15.5%) had such plan for the whole areasof the communes.An additional criterion used for selecting communes as a subject of the study wasthe higher depletion percentage of forest lands than the respective mean value for thewhole country, that is 0.7%. This limitation helped to single out only those territorialunits which had a significant impact on the forest lands resources in their region.4. results and discussionDiscussion on the depletion of forest lands in areas bordering on the capitals of voivode-ships should start from a statement that these lands are an element of the landscape andimportant resource affecting the natural and environmental spheres. As such they aresubject to special protection, and their excessive elimination can have a negative influ-ence on applying the principle of sustainable development in the areas close to largeurban agglomerations. 41.2% of the 34 communes, chosen for further analysis, hada land use plan that did not even cover 50% of their total area and 20.6% of them hadsuch plans covering the whole of their area, while half of the studied territorial unitshad land use plans that covered more than 80% of their area.Among the 34 studied communes there were 10 urban communes, 6 urban-ruralcommunes and 18 rural communes. The target group of the research consisted ofcommunes bordering on 11 out of 18 voivodeships’ capitals. The studied territorialunits bordered on: Gdańsk (2 communes), Katowice (2), Kielce (2), Kraków (2), Lublin(4), Łódź (5), Opole (2), Szczecin (2), Toruń (1), Warsaw (11) and Wrocław (1).Thanks to the adopted criterion it was possible to determine the influence ofurban sprawl on adjacent areas of cities and assess its impact on forest lands. Thecities like Warsaw, Łódź and Lublin are the ones that exert the greatest influence ontheir surroundings, affecting respectively on 11, 5 and 4 of their neighbouring units.In the remaining cases the number of territorial units bordering on the city does notexceed two.GLL No. 3•2015THE CHANGE IN THE FOREST LAND SHARE IN COMMUNES THREATENED...Table 1.Statistics of land-use plans and forest land share in 2013 in the studies communesCommunetyperuralruralruralruralurbanruralruralruralurbanruralurban-ruralurban-ruralruralruralruralurbanurban-ruralwiejskaurban-ruralurbanruralurban-ruralurbanurbanruralruralurbanurbanLand intendedin local usePercentage ofplans forland-use plandeforestation[%][ha]10027.494.999.910099.810015.546.210092.4100.395.313.431.236.268.981.318.397.396.849.157.415.462.812.326.497.95403226323020010162561421655252312571741211559118901293799617Forest cover[%]2.618.84.7814.311.825.26.210.18.43.99.31.374.64225.311.612.814.933.741.827.32773.642.950.4444.349CommuneThe forest landloss indicator[%]1.32.059.25.677.122.916.71.48.82.15.52.29.51.10.938.227.819.12.012.71.43.316.82.11.01.11.01.1KobierzyceLubiczJastkówNiemceŚwidnikWólkaAndrespolBrójceKonstantynówŁódzkiPabianiceRzgówSkawinaZielonkiIzabelinJabłonnaJózefówKonstancin-JeziornaLesznowolaŁomiankiMarkiNieporętPiasecznoSulejówekZielonkaTarnów OpolskiTurawaGdyniaPruszczGdańskiGeomatics, Landmanagement and Landscape No. 3•2015
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