Summary:

Rural areas are of great importance both for the natural environment and for economic life in Poland. Increasingly greater importance is assigned to their non-agricultural functions, such as: residential function, water management, regeneration of people’s strength and health, conservation of the natural environment, forestry, etc. The necessity for reconstruction of farming structures, regulation of processes related to the circulation of water and water erosion, and the need to protect water resources and natural biocenoses, will require formulation of a new usage model in those areas, and introduction of thorough changes in the area of agricultural management. Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004 has allowed for taking long-term, very costly but necessary actions implementing the most important general social objectives, such as flood prevention and regulation of water relations, protection of the resources and valours of the natural environment and its partial renaturalization, shaping of the required climatic and landscape advantages of the rural areas, extension of the agricultural function of farms (apart from manufacturing activities) with ecological activities (related to conservation and protection), as well as conservation of cultural and ethnographic properties of the rural areas. Due to organizational reasons and their pro-social nature, such activities should be run within governmental operating programmes designed and implemented on the territories of several regions with similar features related to farming structures and the natural environment. Financing should mainly come from the EU funds and the budgets. For the government, it should be an important task to develop such programmes for regions in the upper and lower Vistula River basin. Due to significant risk of flooding on large areas, special natural and cultural valours, and great importance of the region for proper functioning of both the natural environment and economic life of Poland, it is particularly urgent to develop and implement such a programme for three regions located in the upper Vistula River basin (Śląskie, Małopolskie and Podkarpackie Voivodeships) which house most mountainous and plateau areas, including the entire area of the Polish Carpathians. When implementing such tasks, on condition of significant changes in legislations and procedures forming their legal framework, land integration should take place as an effective and necessary tool for complex rebuilding of the distribution of agricultural farms and spatial structures in the rural areas.