There exists obvious environmental heterogeneity in China with regard to structure, function, impact and countermeasures, due to its evolution and its interaction with human beings. Accordingly, the environmental management in different regions faces different problems and challenges that need prior solution. Environmental managers are often faced with the task of combining similar environmental units with similar environmental problems within an extensive area into larger zones that may be considered homogeneous for planning and management purposes. According to the regional heterogeneity in environmental characters, problems and its social and economic influencing factors, environmental management regionalization (EMR) aims to classify environmental units into homogeneous zones, and to provide strategies and countermeasures needed to improve environmental quality for each zone. It should play an important role in regional environmental goals setting, policy making and investment decision-making. In this paper, we combined both of qualitative and quantitative analysis to perform EMR in the entire country. Firstly, on the basis of three physical geography domains in comprehensive physical regionalization of China, we obstained four environmental management domains (EMD), which includes the south summer Monsoon domain, the north summer Monsoon domain, the arid domain of northwest China and the Tibetan Plateau domain according to physio-geographical pattern in China and some key boundaries in related regionalization and planning. The main differences in environmental characters among the four EMDs are their natural resource endowment, ecological carrying capacity and environmental vulnerability. Secondly, based on the four themes of “natural resource endowment, social and economic development levels, utilization efficiency of resources and eco-environmental effects”, we developed a regionalization indicator system that consists of thirteen indicators, which were selected from the thirty-two candidate indicators to analyze the similarity of environmental characters and its social and economic influencing factors between neighbouring provinces in each EMD. Thirdly, based on the regionalization indicator system, the method of Euclidean distance measurement was employed to conduct quantitative classification and a one-dimensional Euclidean distance similarity coefficient was used to quantify the similarity of environmental characters and its influencing factors between neighbouring provinces. Based on these analysis, the neighbouring provinces with high similarity in environmental characters and its influencing factors were merged into one environmental management region. Thus, a preliminary draft of EMR was carried out. Fourthly, the preliminary draft of EMR was adjusted according to the historical relationship and the development trend of regional integration between neighbouring provinces, and thus eight environmental management regions based on provincial units were carried out. Finally, through boundary adjustment on regionalization scheme based on provincial units, eight environmental management regions in unit of prefecture were obtained, including the northeastern China region, the north China plain region, the loess plateau region, the southeast coast region, the middle reaches region of Yangtze River, the southwestern China region, the northwestern China region and the Tibetan plateau region. Each environmental management region faces different environmental problems that need prior solutions. The further research will focus on setting prior goals, and constituting suitable environmental management policies for each environmental management region according to its main environmental problems.