The Yangtze River Economic Belt has become an important region for promoting green development in China. From the perspective of major function oriented zones, the green development evaluation index system of the Yangtze River Economic Belt with the water system as the link was constructed. The spatial pattern of green development and the level of coupling and coordination of each subsystem in 130 cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt in 2018 was explored by using the comprehensive weighting method, spatial autocorrelation and coupling and coordination model, and the problem areas of green development were identified by classification. The results show that:1) the green development level of Yangtze River Economic Belt indicates a decreasing trend from downstream, midstream to upstream. The green development index of each major function oriented zone is shown as optimized development zone>restricted development zone>key development zone. 2) The value of coupling coordination of green development subsystems is between 0.365-0.656, which is mostly in the critical range of near disorder and barely coordinated, and the overall level of coupling coordination is low. 3) From the perspective of the Yangtze River Economic Belt as a whole, the green development of most cities in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River is mainly limited by the low level of resource utilization and industrial development, and the consequently ecological and living problems. The ability of each provincial capital or municipality directly under the central government in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River to drive the green development of other cities in the region is insufficient. From the perspective of major function oriented zones, the optimized development zones are dominated by ecological issues, with only Shanghai and Jiaxing; the key development zones are dominated by ecological and production issues, concentrated within the Wuhan metropolitan area and the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle; and the restricted development zones are dominated by production and living issues, mainly located in inter-provincial border city areas. Finally, the problem identification results are integrated and specific countermeasures are proposed for the green development path of each major problem area in the Yangtze River Economic Belt respectively.