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Multidimensional crisis phenomena (financial–economic, environmental and social), plaguing the international community, especially in the last 30 years, have intensified resentment towards traditional models of growth and socio-economic development. The European Commission has placed the idea of a green economy (GE) at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy. This paper presents an assessment of the implementation of the green economy assumptions in EU countries in 2018, taking 2010 as the base year. Using taxonomic methods, a synthetic evaluation index (GEI—Green Economy Index) was constructed based on a multi-criterion set of 27 indicators. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How green are the European economies? What are the main challenges in this context? The average value of the index for the EU countries decreased in the studied years from 0.3423 to 0.3294, which can be interpreted as a slowdown in the greening processes. The key recommendations for the upcoming years include the improvement of energy efficiency indicators, the further increase in the share of renewable energy sources in the energy balance. Moreover, a significant problem continues to be the high percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, as well as low CO2 and resource productivity rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for clean energy is a key global issue requiring global ideas to be implemented through local action. This is particularly important in Poland's energy transition, since the country produces energy mainly from conventional sources, i.e., coal, gas, and crude oil. Adverse climate change caused by high emissions of the economy based on the combustion of hydrocarbons as well as the growing public awareness have made it necessary to look for new environmentally friendly energy sources. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the use of alternative energy sources, biomass in particular, is compatible with sustainable development policy. Eight indicators for the EU-28 and for Poland were analysed in order to verify the progress in modifying the energy mix between 2010 and 2018 in the context of implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The analysis showed that both in the EU-28 and in Poland, the aggregated indicator taking into account the positive and negative change in the values of individual indicators improved between 2010 and 2018. In the EU-28, this indicator is higher (180.1) than in Poland (152.3). The lower value for Poland is mainly due to the fact that the main source of energy in Poland remains hard coal and lignite. However, the noticeable increase in recent years in the share of energy from renewable sources, biomass included, allows us to look with hope to a rapidly growing indicator measuring progress towards a sustainable development goal, and to improving environmental standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]