Streszczenie:

The article aims at identification and assessment of the extent to which rural communes in Poland participate in financing environmental protection investments. Investments in the natural environment protection are the subject of the paper. The analysis addresses particularly the issue of their financing, especially funding from budgetary means of rural communes with regard to territorial division into provinces. Secondary sources of information for the years 2004-2009 were used in the investigations. Among the sources of funding for environmental protection investments, the most important are own means covering almost half of the outlays on fixed assets for the natural environmental protection. Expenses from communes' budgets are of marginal importance for the structure of environmental protection funding. Communes' investment expenditure focuses almost exclusively on wastewater management, water protection and waste management.Rural communes financed 20.3% of the total environmental investment outlays realized by all communes. Environmental protection (together with public utilities) are on the second position among the investment objectives of rural communes. The largest scale of investment expenditure on the environmental pro-tection in 2009 was registered in the Podkarpackie province, where rural communes financed about 20% of investment outlays in this field made by all rural communes in Poland total.Tangible effects of the realized environmental investments financed from rural communes' budgets in 2009 in Poland are diversified spatially. Considering investments in wastewater management, three provinces (Podkarpackie, Małopolskie and Mazowieckie) realized investments such as collective sewer sys-tem constituting almost half of the total length of such investments realized in 2009 in rural areas. Similar situation was observed for the length of house sewers and collective wastewater treatment plants. It was the same also in case of individual wastewater treatment plants of which half of the whole number commissioned for use in Poland was located in the areas of four provinces: Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Lubelskie, Mazowieckie and Wielkopolskie.