ISSN 0097-8078, Water Resources, 2010, Vol. 37, No. 6, pp. 854–861. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2010. Original Russian Text © A.P. Khaustov, M.M. Redina, 2010, published in Vodnye Resursy, 2010, Vol. 37, No. 6, pp. 730–738. 854 INTRODUCTION Russian water legislation has been appreciably altered in recent years. Thus, the introduction of the new Water Code in 2006 caused difficulties in the use of earlier regulations governing the impact on water bodies and environmental standardization in the sphere of water use as a whole. The most complicated problems related to the regulation of use and protec- tion of subsurface hydrosphere resources. The very few (relative to documents dealing with surface water pro- tection) and often systemless normative and legislative acts in this field practically “lost the support” of the Water Code, since it gives very little attention to the issues of groundwater use and protection. The Under- ground Resources Law adopted as long ago as 1992 also contains too few information about groundwater use, and even this has very general form. A new version of the law has not been adopted by now and would hardly introduce any considerable corrections in the current situation with groundwater use and protec- tion. This is primarily due to the problems of forma- tion of the regulatory framework for subsurface hydro- sphere, which are discussed in [9, 10]. No doubt, this gap should be filled. Of great inter- est in this context is the experience of European coun- tries in the harmonizing water legislation, adapting the legal framework to the new unified requirements, and developing new approaches to the use and protection of groundwater against depletion and pollution. Works along this line have been in progress over 10 years. The basic documents (EU directives) that have been devel- oped and introduced into practice will be analyzed in this paper (review). GEOHYDROLOGICAL TERMINOLOGY USED IN REGULATORY DOCUMENTS ABROAD Note that in addition to the development of new regulatory documents, an important problem is to unify terminology. Clearly, both legal practice and the practice of water use in different countries can be rad- ically different in different countries. In this context, the development of joint (unified) normative and leg- islative documents requires the formation of a com- mon approach to the interpretation of the terms. A spectacular example of such complicated process is the adaptation of international standards of environ- mental management in Russia. The first such standard (ISO 14001) appeared abroad in 1996, while the adap- tation (in simpler words, the preparation of an intelli- gible translation adequate to the Russian practice of environmental management) of this document took several years. Upon the adoption of the second gener- ation of standards, the translation of some key notions was changed, and the practice of environmental man- agement in Russia also moved nearer to international approaches. These changes allow such documents to be taken more adequately. In this context, some terminological features of the documents reviewed here should be analyzed. Some terms used by European geohydrologists are not in wide use in Russian special literature, so it is necessary to interpret them before considering the documents themselves. A key objective in water use regulation in foreign documents is the achievement of a “good condition of water bodies,” by which is meant their general state when equilibrium is attained between variations and anthropogenic impact, on the one hand, and the eco- logical functions of water, on the other hand [10, 14]. WATER RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT: ECONOMIC AND LEGAL ASPECTS European Experience in Environmental Regulations for Groundwater Use A. P. Khaustov and M. M. Redina Russian Peoples Friendship University, Podol’skoe shosse 8/5, 115093 Russia Received April 20, 2009 Abstract—European experience in the groundwater use regulations is considered using the case of FRG, where such regulations are based on quality standards and quantitative characteristics of impact on ground- water and surface water and landscape features. Basic documents verified in the water use management sys- tem in EU are used. Keywords: subsurface hydrosphere, water use, pollution, environmental standardization, ecological regula- tions. DOI: 10.1134/S0097807810060114