The low quality technology used for large-scale burning of brown coal led to a sharp increase in the content of harmful sulfur dioxide and aerosols in the atmosphere. The result was wholesale damage to the environment (such as the die-back of the forests in the Ore Mountains from acid rain) and human health. In view of the unsustainable situation, the first post-communist Czechoslovak government decided to resolve the situation by introducing desulphurization and aerosol removal from major state-owned power plants, and the setting of limits which specific mines should not go beyond in future. In areas that had already been mined, support was also given to the reclamation of damaged landscape.
