Abstract: The cumulative environmental impact is one of the most important components in the environment research.The essence content of defining cumulative environmental impacts is put forward based on the review of the connotation including the cumulative environmental impacts sort and the concept's generation and development; the research in cumulative environmental impacts is conducted abroad for a long time and there are some problems,such as the concept inconsistency,the poor quantity of method and the lack of recognization.In China research in cumulative environmental impacts concentrates more on the analysis methods,but less on the definition and examples since 1990s.Then several analysis methods are classfied by the different application conditions.Especially,the research status of cumulative environmental impact assessment in water resource subject and the cumulative environmental impacts' characteristic in cascade hydropower exploitation are introduced in this paper.And four research trends are proposed.