Czechs Pledge to Clean Up Water, Air

PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia — Czechoslovakia on Friday pledged to clean up its water and air and reverse some of Europe’s worst environmental pollution by the turn of the century.

“The process of deterioration of the human environment . . . is to be halted by the end of the 1980s and by the year 2000 air and waters are to be at least as unpolluted as the turn of the 1960s and 1970s,” the state-run CTK news agency reported Friday.

The government in recent years has placed emphasis on industrial growth and has rarely commented on pollution problems.

A report drawn up for the government last year by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences described environmental damage in the Soviet bloc country as “very serious.”

“By the end of the century 45% to 60% of the forest area, up to 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres) will be directly damaged,” by acid rain and other forms of pollution, the academy said. A copy of its confidential report report had been smuggled out of the country.