The global environmental problem in the 21st century is becoming increasing prominent, innovation is greatly needed for the methods for environmental management. Combined with the theory and practice of the methods for environmental management, this article compares the four management methods commonly accepted in the environment field and hold that: regulation method owns direct environmental effect, but it is difficult to get accurate information, unable to adapt to the environmental change and the cost is high; economic method is of low cost, flexibility, fairness and with dynamic efficiency, but always can not undertake the main responsibility of the environmental management; information method independently plays a encouraging role in the environment protection while assisting the government, enterprises and the citizens to improve the environment, but it lacks of normalization; the voluntary method now under probe further improves the relation between the government and the enterprises, the cost is lower with higher environmental goal achieved, and has lasting encouraging effect for the voluntary environment protection activities. So we can make the conclusion: the environmental problem can't be solved by one single method, the effective environmental management must depend on the coordination and cooperation of all the methods. The foundation role of the regulation method should be strengthened, the leading role of economic method should also be strengthened, specialized in the development of information method and voluntary method to make them the main force of the environmental management.
