Poland has united to cut back on coal. This activist led the way.

Like most inhabitants of Kraków, Anna Dworakowska had never really questioned the smog.

The thick, orangey haze wraps her city, Poland’s second-largest, every winter. But she saw it as a part of the season. Nobody talked about it as anything abnormal.

But in 2012, Ms. Dworakowska’s husband, an environmental economist, showed her a scientific paper that shocked her. It said that Kraków was the European Union’s third-most-polluted city. Even more shocking, she says, was the culprit. The pollution came not from cars or industry, but from a quintessentially Polish habit: heating homes with coal.

Poland both produces and consumes the lion’s share of the coal that the EU uses to stay warm in winter – as much as 80%. And when consumed, it results in clouds of particulate matter that contain probable carcinogens such as benzopyrene and clog the lungs, making Poland into the EU country with the highest coal-related health costs. Hundreds of Cracovians have died prematurely as a result, according to several clean-air research groups, including the European Respiratory Society in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Angry and alarmed for her children’s well-being, Ms. Dworakowska rallied other young parents like her around an awareness-raising campaign about smog. “We decided that either we move out of the city, or we would try and fight for our air,” she says. Their efforts would lead to the creation of Polish Smog Alert, a national movement that has pushed through groundbreaking initiatives for cleaner air and shifted thinking in one of Europe’s most coal-dependent, polluted countries. And it helped make Kraków the first city in Poland to ban most coal heating.

Isabelle de Pommereau

Anna Dworakowska's efforts helped lead to the creation of Polish Smog Alert.

“Anna forced the public administration in Kraków to set whole new laws connected to clean air goals,” says Maciej Fijak, a local district councilor in Kraków. The Smog Alert program is “the most successful story in Polish civil society action ever.”

A “smoke awakening”

Until 2012, Ms. Dworakowska had been working as an English teacher and translator specializing in environmental protection issues. But the revelation about Kraków’s self-inflicted smog problem shifted her course toward environmental activism.

“We’re breathing one of the most polluted air in the EU, and we don’t know about it,” says Ms. Dworakowska. The parents she rallied “decided that this is ridiculous.”

At the time, the Arab Spring had just shown the power of social media. Ms. Dworakowska and her allies decided to attempt a similar road, launching the Kraków Smog Alert group on Facebook. They posted daily smog emission levels and recommendations on whether it was safe to go out.

That was new for – and news to – Cracovians. “People started getting angry,” she says. “They did not know they were living in such a dirty place with such dirty air.”

And they started to add their voices to the Smog Alert cause. One Sunday in November 2012, during the peak of the smog season, thousands of residents pushed empty strollers – symbolizing that taking children out in the fresh air was potentially deadly – in a march for cleaner air in Kraków. Myriad protest actions followed, with demonstrators – from regular folks to scientists, musicians, and actors – demanding that Kraków ban coal heating, help people switch to less-polluting forms of heating, and pay the heating bills of the city’s poorest residents.

Politicians were slow to get on board. “At first, [they] would say, ‘Oh, your demands are crazy, impossible to fulfill. We cannot ban the use of coal in the city because old people will freeze to death!’” Ms. Dworakowska recalls. “They said, ‘Who is supporting you? Where do you get money from? Which side of the political divide are you on?’”

But as time went on, the political mood shifted and city hall warmed to the activists – a “smoke awakening,” Ms. Dworakowska calls it. In 2013, Kraków passed its milestone coal and wood ban, which came into force six years later. More than 20 cities across Poland have since adopted similar bans.

“A bipartisan issue”

At the same time, Ms. Dworakowska’s group was growing nationally.

In 2015, it became Polish Smog Alert, a national network with local offshoots in 50 Polish cities, which pushed for clean-air legislation at the national level. For example, Polish Smog Alert was instrumental in persuading the national government in Warsaw to ban high-polluting coal boilers, to establish national coal quality norms, and to allow cities to prohibit the entry of high-pollution cars.

And the results haven’t just been legislative. Kraków now has only 500 residents using coal for heating, compared with 30,000 in 2013. There are only 30 “smog days” a year in the city compared with 120 then. In the country as a whole, use of coal to stay warm has dropped to 50%, down from 70% in 2013.

Still, smog remains a big problem in Kraków, because heating with coal remains an entrenched habit in many of the surrounding smaller cities and villages. That’s because coal is still often seen as a symbol of Poland’s industry and independence.

“I remember being afraid of going out with my kids sometimes, as though I were stepping on the toes of a very powerful lobby group,” Ms. Dworakowska says. “People said coal is a sacred thing; we should not do anything about it. They did not understand nor did they question the impact of coal on pollution.”

Beyond legislative change, the real revolutionary power of Ms. Dworakowska’s Smog Alert program is that it has ignited a “societal mentality change,” says Zuzanna Rudzińska-Bluszcz, undersecretary of state in Poland’s department of justice and a former president of Poland’s ClientEarth Lawyers for the Earth Foundation. Coal-related smog is “one of the most important environmental issues in Poland,” she adds, and Ms. Dworakowska “is linking people from various districts of Poland together around a bipartisan issue.”