On November 9, Vitebsk / Diana Kurilo - BELTA /. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection has prepared amendments to the Water Code of Belarus and will submit them for discussion by deputies in 2012. This was announced today to journalists by Vitaly Kulik, First Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection of Belarus, who, as co-chairman of the joint Belarusian-Russian commission on the protection and rational use of transboundary waters, is participating in the sixth meeting of the commission, which opened today in Vitebsk, reports BELTA correspondent. The amendments to the Code and other normative acts are driven by the need to align Belarusian water legislation with the legislation of the Russian Federation and the European Union, he explained. Belarusian ecologists work in close cooperation with their counterparts from neighboring countries on the protection and rational use of transboundary waters. Belarus has signed and is implementing cooperation agreements in this area with the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Productive relations are developing with ecologists from Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, added Vitaly Kulik. The work of joint commissions allows for the development of unified approaches to monitoring transboundary waters, prompt information exchange, and the pooling of scientific and practical efforts to develop proposals for improving the environmental situation. The sixth meeting of the commission discusses proposals for research and applied research work to improve the water management situation in the basins of the Dnieper and Western Dvina rivers, to improve their ecological condition, and considers criteria for assessing the content of heavy metals in surface waters of transboundary water bodies. The joint Belarusian-Russian commission on the protection and rational use of transboundary waters operates in accordance with the agreement on cooperation in the field of protection and rational use of transboundary waters, signed in 2002 between the Government of Belarus and the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes. The previous meeting of the commission was held in 2010 in Moscow.-0-

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