The analysis of similarities between the European Union countries in terms of the level and structure of the emissions of selected gases and air pollutants into the atmosphere

Based on the newly adopted strategy “The European Green Deal”, by 2050, the European Union should become the first climate neutral region worldwide. This very ambitious goal will require many political, social and economic activities. Huge financial resources will also be needed to change the economy in order to reduce the emissions of harmful substances into the environment. The implementation of such an ambitious climate policy requires the development of a very reasonable economic plan, backed by many analyses, to ensure adequate financing of this idea. One of the basic objectives of such a plan should be to appropriately target aid funds to a group of countries with a similar structure of the emissions in question. The identification of the groups of similar countries in terms of the structure of harmful substance emissions requires the development of both appropriate methodology and applicable studies. Such methodology is presented in this paper, namely the Kohonen’s artificial neural network model. The main objective of the developed methodology was to divide the European Union countries into groups similar in terms of the emissions of selected gases and dusts into the atmosphere. In addition to the division of the European Union countries into similar groups by the total volume of the emissions of studied substances, completely new division criteria were introduced. It was assumed that in order for the results of this study to be practically used, it is necessary to broaden the scope of the analysis. Therefore, an additional division of the European Union countries was made in relation to the volume of the emissions per capita, the value of gross domestic product and the area of a given country. This new approach was intended to show the diversity of the European Union countries in economic, demographic and geographical terms. The grouping results should be regarded as additional information to be utilized when preparing specific action plans to improve the state of the environment. Definitely, these plans need to be dedicated both to the groups of countries and the entire sectors in these groups. This will enable the efficient use of financial resources and can be a huge impetus for the European Union economic development. It will also allow smaller and less prosperous countries to achieve their goals. Undoubtedly, the developed methodology and conducted research allowed the authors to solve a significant research problem, and the results can be successfully used in practice.