THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT’S POTENTIAL AS A DRIVING FORCE BEHIND THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL AREAS

Abstract

All definitions of the natural environment’s potential provided by the literature highlight the role of humans as entities making use of environmental resources. The natural environment creates conditions for life processes to occur by supplying raw materials and energy required to satisfy various human needs. It provides a basis and a precondition for socio-economic development. It is, however, difficult to define the natural environment’s potential in its entirety, therefore the study focused on the resource-and-performance aspect of this potential.
Hence, the article aims at identifying the relationships between the level of the natural environment’s potential and the level of socio-economic development of communes. The study involved communes located in Warmińsko-Mazurskie Voivodeship. The study was carried out in several stages and involved an analysis of the level of the natural environment’s potential as well as of the meta-indicator that shows the socio-economic determinants of communes in a synthetic manner. The analysis of the relationships between the level of the natural environment’s potential and the socio-economic development was performed using the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient.

Keywords: rural areas, natural environment, socio-economic development, environmental potential

Article DOI: http://doi.org/10.15544/RD.2017.120