With the economic development and population growth, the contradiction between water supply and demand has become more and more acute, and it has been aggravated further by the irrational utilization of water resources As a result, the deterioration and destruction of the ecological environment has become increasingly serious In order to effectively protect the ecological environment and improve its quality, researches on ecological and environmental water requirements (EEWR) have been carried out In this paper, progresses in the EEWR research were briefly summarized According to the ecological and environmental functions of the ecosystem, EEWR was mainly classified into several types, including EEWR of rivers, EEWR of vegetation, EEWR for protecting and restoring the ecological and environmental functions of lakes & wetlands, EEWR for cities, EEWR for restoring underground water table in the over exploited regions,etc Furthermore, their corresponding calculating methods were discussed In the end, issues necessary to be studied in this field were put forward For example, to establish a rational classification system, it was necessary to comprehensively study the regional differentiation of the eco environment, then to analyze water consuming characteristics of various ecosystems, and finally, to reveal water consuming rules for these ecosystems Furthermore, studies on the logical and accurate calculation methods for various types of EEWR should be strengthened.