Sustainable development of the country, considered as a Constitutional Principle of the Republic of Poland, defined in the Environmental Protection Act as the "socio-economic development integrating political, economic and social actions, balanced with environmental protection and permanence of basic natural processes in order to ensure the possibility of satisfying the basic needs of individual communities or citizens in both the present generation and future generations".

Due to the absence of Polish National Strategy for Sustainable Development coordinating policies related to sustainable development, the process of monitoring can be implemented using a set of indicators selected on the basis of principles and objectives written down in the national documents of strategic nature.

The publication Sustainable Development Indicators for Poland 2015 presents a proposal of Polish official statistics in terms of a set of indicators to monitor sustainable development of the country. The indicators are grouped in four domains: social, economic, environmental, and institutional-political. Areas were differentiated within the domains, reflecting the objectives and priorities of sustainable development contained in the national strategic documents.

The main part of the publication contains an analytic description of sustainable development indicators of the country enriched with tables and charts containing data for the years 2004-2014. Data for Poland are compared with data for the European Union and individual Member States. Descriptions of indicators are preceded by a short indicator profile containing not only the definitions but basic methodological explanations and information about the importance of the indicator for sustainable development as well.

The set of elaborated indicators will be developed in subsequent years subject to further work on updating the scope of measures to adapt to the existing strategic documents and the selection of indicators most fully reflecting the idea of sustainable development in national conditions.