Forest fires, due to climate change, are a growing threat to human life, health, and property, especially in temperate climates. Unfortunately, the impact of individual factors on forest fires varies, depending on the geographical region and its natural and socio-economic conditions. The latter are rarely introduced into fire warning systems, which significantly reduces their effectiveness. Therefore, the main goal of this study was to quantify the impact of a wide range of anthropogenic factors on forest fires, using Poland as a representative example of a Central European country. Data were analyzed in relation to districts for the period 2007–2017, using correlation analysis and regression modeling applying global and local/mixed regression methods. It was found that almost all of the 28 variables taken for analysis significantly determined the density of forest fires, but the greatest role was played by the length of the border between forests and built-up areas, and road density. In addition, the impact of most of the analyzed variables on forest fires varied over the study area, so implementing non-stationarity in geographically weighted regression models significantly improved the goodness-of-fit compared to global models.

The importance of agri-food systems for global sustainability calls for researching and advancing socio-technical transitions towards environmentally friendly models of farming. These transitions hinge on many prerequisites, one of which is providing access to land for farmers and new entrants who experiment with sustainable farming models. However, for socio-technical transitions in farming to be viable, access to land should be complemented with securing access to “intangible” resources such as skills, knowledge or networks. It seems that increasingly often these resources are being provided by various grassroots initiatives. The goal of this paper is to identify how the strategies employed by grassroots initiatives support farmers and new entrants in transitioning to sustainable farming models. In order to answer that question, we perform case studies of three Polish initiatives—Agro-Perma-Lab, PermaKultura.Edu.PL and the Ecological Folk High School in Grzybów—active in promoting agroecology, permaculture and organic farming. The results show a diversity of strategies employed by these initiatives that reflect the frameworks in which they operate. Considering these strategies from the perspective of transition studies suggests that they can be replicated in other contexts and potentially contribute to advancing socio-technical transitions of agri-food systems.

The regeneration of rural areas is a multifaceted process driven by a variety of actors operating in diverse contexts. Understanding specific barriers faced by these actors—as well as factors that contribute to the success of their initiatives—therefore seems to be a prerequisite for designing policies that can effectively support rural changemakers and thus promote rural regeneration. The goal of this exploratory paper is to identify key challenges and success factors for three types of rural changemakers—rural newcomers, new entrants into farming, and farming successors—based on empirical data gathered in three case studies conducted as part of the Horizon2020 project “RURALIZATION” in Poland in 2021. The results of the study show that one of the most important determinants of the success of rural changemakers’ activities is having adequate formal and informal knowledge. This is important in the context of knowledge transfer, interacting with and functioning in the local environment, and consequently laying the foundations for rural regeneration. Rural regeneration must be treated as a complex and long-term process that is strongly linked to the activation of knowledge transfer mechanisms.

The Role of the Integrating Factor in the Shaping of Transborder Co-Operation: The Case of Poland: Transborder co-operation is shaped by many factors and thus takes various forms on particular bor-ders. Within the same formal-legal arrangements under Interreg Programmes, the greatest role in the diver-sification of co-operation was played by non-system-related conditions specific to particular border regions. To identify what specifically drives co-operation, the nature of Polish-German and Polish-Czech transborder co-operation was compared. On the basis of the research conducted, it can be said that the existence of similar conditions on both sides of the border may define specific directions of co-operation and hence be called an inte-grating factor. Coupled with relatively weak barriers, this integrating factor may exert a powerful influence on the development and character of transborder co-operation. Thus, in the process of shaping co-operation policy it is crucial to identify the existing integrating factor (or to define the possibilities of creating it) and to limit the impact of co-operation barriers.