With the increasing impacts of global environmental changes and human activities on ecosystems, structures and functions of ecosystem change greatly, and their capacities in providing all kinds of services and resources are deteriorating. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between structures and functions of ecosystems and global environmental changes has become the research focus in ecology. This paper reviews the impacts of global environmental changes on typical ecosystems (including forest ecosystem, estuary wetland ecosystem and city ecosystem) and the adaptation to the global change, analyzes the difficulties and challenges facing ahead, and based on this puts forward the prospects for future researches. For the study of the relationships between forest ecosystems and global environmental changes, the future research will pay attention to long-term global environmental change experiments with controlled multi-factors and better simulated reality, and the coupling function between different biogeochemical cycles. For the study on the relationships between wetland ecosystems and global environmental changes, we will focus on the impacts of nitrogen deposition, sulfur deposition and salt water intrusion on carbon and nitrogen cycles in wetland ecosystem, clarify blue carbon function of coastal wetland, and learn more about the changes in structure and function of wetland ecosystems and their resilience under the influences of the extreme climate and human disturbance. For the study on the relationships between urban ecosystems and global environmental changes, we will deepen the understanding of the mechanisms of urban biogeochemical cycles,attach importance to humanistic demand in urban ecosystem and carry out long-term, multi-factor responsive researches in typical region. For the study on the adaptation to global environmental changes, a quantified and trans-scale adaptability evaluation system should be established, and we will strengthen the research on the adaptability of typical area/department and feasibility of adaptive strategy, attaching importance to the relationship between adaptive strategy and alleviating strategy, as well as the implementing risks. We hope the review will provide references for the researches on ecosystems and global environmental changes in China.