A disaster warning on Lake Łebsko, a fishing dispute and a CBA arrest. Słowiński National Park's hardest autumn

Słowiński National Park, one of Poland's two coastal national parks and a UNESCO biosphere reserve, has within half a year become the subject of four separate matters: a ministry inspection, a dispute over fishing on Lake Łebsko, the arrest of an employee by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau and an open letter on the state of the water in the park's largest lake. Each has different protagonists and a different weight. Together they paint a picture of an institution whose handling of the lake has been questioned for months by a local activist, and one of whose employees is accused by investigators of trying to bribe his own director.

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02 october 2026   |   07:38   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. Tomasz Pietrzak

In late September Tomasz Pietrzak, a community activist from the Łeba area, sent an open letter to regional, county and municipal councillors and to mayors in which he called the protection of Łebsko "a farce" and warned of "an irreversible ecological catastrophe". He cites a final report from 2024 entitled "Concept for a project to protect and restore Lake Łebsko", from which, he says, it follows that the lake is in a state of extreme hypertrophy and that faecal bacteria and toxic cyanobacteria are massively present in the water. He accuses the park's director, Łukasz Ciżmowski, of inaction and of blaming the problem on "the natural bream population", and the Ministry of Climate and Environment and the environmental funds of silence. He asks local councillors to put pressure on the director and the ministries.

The report the letter relies on is not publicly available

No document of that title appears in any public repository: not on the park's website, not at the Regional Fund for Environmental Protection in Gdańsk, not in university databases or at the Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection. Tomasz Pietrzak says in the letter that he will send the full results to any interested councillor or journalist. He does not say who commissioned the report, who produced it or whether it contains its own measurements from the lake.

The title points to a pre-project study of the kind commissioned before applying for restoration funding. It is not known whether it is the same document the park's director referred to in July, when Radio Gdańsk cited "an expert study by scientists carried out for Słowiński National Park" which was said to show that years of fishing had changed the structure of the lake's fish fauna. If so, both sides of the dispute are drawing on one source and reading different chapters of it.

Łebsko has been in poor condition for at least forty years

Łebsko is Poland's third-largest lake and its largest coastal one: 7,142 hectares, or 22 per cent of the park's area, with an average depth of 1.6 metres and a maximum of 6.3. It is fed by the Łeba river, which brings in 11 cubic metres of water a second along with nutrients gathered in an agricultural catchment, while a short outlet links it to the sea and makes the water periodically brackish. Since 1941 the lake has lost 382 hectares to river sediment, sand blown from the moving dunes and the spread of reed beds.

Poor water quality is not a discovery of 2024. Surveys from 1985 to 1995 placed Łebsko in class III for purity and class III for susceptibility to degradation, the worst categories then in use, and the bacteriology of the Łeba below the lake was also class III in 2000. The park's planning documents have for years described high eutrophication, high turbidity and the expansion of reed beds at the expense of submerged vegetation. What may be new in Tomasz Pietrzak's letter are specific bacteriological and cyanobacterial results and a restoration recommendation; the word "hypertrophy" itself is not new.

The park removes bream because that is what active protection of a shallow lake looks like

The argument about bream, which Tomasz Pietrzak ridicules, has a basis in limnology. In shallow lakes dominated by cyprinid fish, bream and roach stir up bottom sediments and release phosphorus from them, driving algal blooms. Regulatory removal of cyprinids is a recognised biomanipulation method used in lake restoration across Europe. The park has carried it out for years as active protection, recorded in its planning documents alongside stocking with predatory fish and the capture of sea trout spawners.

The mechanism works like this. The park tenders for "protective tasks on Lake Łebsko and Lake Gardno consisting in regulating the species composition of the fish fauna through fish removal". The contractor, currently a fishing company from Izbica, removes mainly cyprinids using traditional methods; predators that end up in the nets may not exceed 15 per cent of the catch. The fish are sold at minimum prices set by the park, which takes 20 per cent of the value of fish caught and sold. The park's angling rules set no limit on bream and white bream, while pike and zander may be taken at two a day combined. The park itself treats bream as a surplus species.

In July the activist protested against the removals, in September against their justification

It was precisely this mechanism that Tomasz Pietrzak attacked in July, when he revealed that in one season the company had paid the park just under 17,000 zloty for removing 60 tonnes of fish, while anglers pay around 180,000 zloty a year. He estimated this year's removals at 170 tonnes and spoke of a park treated "like a private estate". Residents of Smołdzino and anglers demanded an inspection.

The director replied that the fishermen "have always been here" and fish to maintain the balance between predators and non-predatory fish, that the rules are consulted with the scientific council, and that this year three bids had been received for the two lakes. The park added that nothing untoward was happening.

There is a tension between the activist's July and September positions which the letter does not resolve. If the lake is choking on nutrients, removing cyprinids is one of the few tools the park has in hand, and the bream argument is then an argument about restoration, not an excuse. If the removals are predatory and too cheap, the complaint concerns the contract and the price, not inaction. Both claims cannot be held at once, and Tomasz Pietrzak does not say which one he is making.

The minister amended the park's protective tasks, but restoration is not among them

In December 2024 the Minister of Climate and Environment amended by ordinance the protective tasks for Słowiński National Park. The document provides, among other things, for the capture of up to 800 kilogrammes of sea trout spawners and 100 kilogrammes of salmon in Łebsko for restoration in the Łeba and Łupawa rivers, areas kept free of fishing gear on Gardno, measures to restore migration routes, and launching sites for boats at Żarnowska and Izbica. The word "restoration", in the sense of lake rehabilitation, does not appear.

This is the point at which the letter's complaint makes most sense: if a restoration concept was produced in 2024 and there is no trace of it in the December ordinance, the question why is a fair one. But it must be put to the ministry that issued the ordinance, not only to the park's director. A separate question goes to the fund in Gdańsk: whether the park ever applied for money to restore Łebsko.

The director was the target of a bribe, not a suspect

The third matter is the most serious legally but concerns other people. On 22 September officers of the CBA's Gdańsk branch arrested an employee of the National Park Service. According to the investigation by the District Prosecutor's Office in Słupsk, he had promised the park's director a material benefit in the form of ownership of two building plots in exchange for breaching spatial planning rules and favourable changes to development conditions for himself. A second strand concerns the service flat allocated to him, which, without the director's knowledge or consent, he repeatedly let to third parties as overnight accommodation and charged for. The prosecutor charged him with corruption, misappropriation, abuse of authority and dereliction of duty, acting to the detriment of the public interest and illegal possession of a firearm. The suspect is under police supervision and has been suspended from duty; he faces up to 10 years in prison.

In this matter Director Łukasz Ciżmowski is the person someone tried to bribe, not a suspect; the CBA brings no charges against him. The Bureau stresses that this is the third action in the ongoing investigation and that further steps are planned, which means the inquiry is wider than one employee.

A ministry inspection faulted the management over the supervision of firearms

The fourth matter does concern the management itself. The Ministry of Climate and Environment inspected the park's supervision of its armoury and the issuing of weapons, ammunition and coercive measures to Park Guard staff. In a report dated 1 April and addressed to the director, inspectors found that one officer had kept a weapon at his home continuously for around four and a half months, that the director had not appointed the committee required by regulation, including a representative of the regional police commander, to assess the armoury and had made that assessment himself, and that he had issued the former Park Guard commander an instruction with no legal basis. The director explained that the former commander had not reported irregularities in the records.

No connection between the inspection and the firearms charge against the arrested employee has been officially confirmed.

A park that cannot be replaced

Słowiński National Park is not one of twenty-three parks in the country but a place that exists nowhere else in Europe: 32 kilometres of natural sea coast, moving dunes that shift by up to 10 metres a year, Poland's two largest coastal lakes, peat bogs in which the culture of the Slovincians survived, and a bird refuge on the migration routes. UNESCO recognised it as a biosphere reserve in 1977, the Ramsar Convention protects its wetlands, and Łeba and Rowy live off the hundreds of thousands of people who come every year to see the dunes and the lakes. Łebsko is the heart of that system: the state of its water determines what happens in the reed beds, on the meadows and at the mouth of the Łeba.

That is why the matters described above are not four separate affairs but one question: whether the park is being watched over as it deserves. By the management, whose job is to protect it and which answers for every decision about the lake; by the ministry, which supervises it and sets its protective tasks; by scientists, whose studies should be public rather than circulating in private emails; and by residents, anglers and activists, whose voice is needed even when it is unfair. A national park is the highest form of nature protection in Poland. That form makes sense only when it is known who does what within its boundaries and why, and when anyone who wants to check can do so.

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Słowiński Park Narodowy jezioro Łebsko CBA park narodowy odłowy Łebsko rekultywacja Łebsko

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