Population aging is a key risk for the future of Europe. Th e Old Continent has to face ever-stronger new demographic trends and fi nd eff ective strategies to address them. In this study, we evaluate the progress of population aging in Europe in the period of 2008–2021. Th e broad time span of our considerations concerns the years 1960–2100. We present our new typological approach to the areas of unbalanced age structure. Its classifi cation includes four groups of countries with various distribution of aging measures, i.e., the percentage of people aged 65 and over and the dynamics of its growth. We observe that the largest group is composed of countries exceeding arithmetic means for both above-mentioned aging measures, which are located mainly in Eastern and Southern Europe. According to stages of aging by median age, most of these countries reached the stage of very old population in the 1990s

Polish rural areas face various social, economic and ecological problems. These processes greatly affect diversification of the standard of living in rural areas. The goal of the study was to assess spatial diversification of the standard of living in rural areas in Poland. It focused on all rural gminas as well as rural parts of rural-urban gminas. In the analysis, the standard of living was evaluated with Perkal’s synthetic index, with 12 variables concerning demographic and economic issues. The time span for the analysis was the period of 2003-2013. The highest standard of living was reported for rural areas located in the vicinity of urban agglomerations. The lowest standards of living were in typical rural gminas with poorly developed service functions. These were mainly depopulated areas from the outskirts of voivodeships. The Vistula River marked the dividing line in the standards of living in rural areas of Poland.

Celem opracowania było określenie znaczenia nowoczesnych technologii stosowanych w wybranych formach działalności rolniczej polskiej wsi. Ukazano przykłady gospodarstw prowadzących działalność gospodarczą w oparciu o warzywnictwo i sadownictwo. Podstawą analizy były informacje uzyskane w 2019 r. podczas bezpośrednich wywiadów terenowych, uzupełnione danymi statystycznymi na temat krajowych upraw i zbiorów. Stosowanie inteligentnych rozwiązań technologicznych w działalności rolniczej ma duże znaczenie, ponieważ podnosi jakość produkcji rolnej. Właściwie dobrane, zrównoważone technologie rolne są jednym z komponentów koncepcji inteligentnej wsi. Jednak takie usprawnienie rolnictwa bez aktywnego włączenia czynnika ludzkiego i stabilnego systemu gospodarczego nie jest efektywne.

The aim of the study is to determine the stress level among the adult residents of Tri-City (Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot), Kielce and Lviv. The study was conducted in January and February 2022. Use was made of a short questionnaire of 25 closed questions, including two scalograms (one covered 10 questions on the sources of experienced anxiety, and the other one was also a 10-item PSS-10 test – Perceived Stress Scale). In the analysis, Kruskal-Wallis H and Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests were applied. In the case of obtaining a statistically significant result of intergroup comparisons, post hoc tests were conducted in order to minimize the error resulting from unequal sample sizes. The stress index level measured by the PSS-10 test amounted to 15.71 in the entire sample, and it was significantly lower among the inhabitants of Lviv (11.94) than in Tri-City (18.07) and Kielce (17.09). When asked about concerns related to the COVID-19 epidemic, the respondents provided different answers depending on the country they lived in. Among the sources of perceived anxiety, residents of Polish cities indicated other people’s attitudes (Tri-City – 55.1%, Kielce – 58.7%) and difficulties in access to health services (64.0% – Kielce, 41.3% – Tri-City). A major source of anxiety for the inhabitants of Ukrainian Lviv, however, was the health of relatives (53.2%) and their own health (49.9%).

A demographic view of the ageing process of a population provides an assessmentof the degree of development of this phenomenon and its dynamics at a given time in a given area, such as an administrative unit, a country or other territory. In this study, the main research aim was to assess the demographic situation of rural areas in Eastern Poland in the context of an ageing population. Changes in both the number of people and the demographic structure of the population living in the region were analysed. The time period of the research covered the years 2008-2020. Statistical data used in the study were derived from the Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland. The assessment of the regional specificity of the processes of demographic changes in rural areas was based on the study of the relationships in the analyzed parameters, with the use of statistical measures defining the range of variability of the examined characteristics. In order to achieve the main aim of the study, a typology of the areas with a disturbed age structure was developed. Four groups of rural areas have been identified (labelled from A to D) which are characterised by varying degrees of advancement of the examined problem in 2020.

The aim of the study was to identify ways of digitalising specific cultural heritage sites in the space of six selected Polish cities: Białystok, Bydgoszcz, Gdynia, Kielce, Olsztyn and Rzeszów. The data used in the analysis came from four types of online sources. Firstly, these were the official websites of the 18 sites under study, existing in the 2022. Another source of information was the tourist review portal Tripadvisor. In addition, information from popular promotional platforms and social networks was taken into account. The study used techniques applied for existing materials analysis, as well as the following methods: analytical, descriptive, internet query, statistical and graphical. An own zero-one rating system was applied, assigned to six categories of assessment of the digitalisation level of the sites. Among the analysed cities, the best results as to the level of digitalisation were obtained by the facilities located in Kielce, Rzeszów and Bydgoszcz, respectively.