The environment is an important part of the urban system，and environmental protection improved with the economic and social development of the city. The 40 years of reform and opening up is also the 40 years of continuous improvement of Shanghai’s environmental protection，and it is also the process of continuously optimizing the relationship between urban environment and economic development. Judging from the environmental protection goals and tasks in different periods，Shanghai Environmental Protection has gone through four stages：the key pollution source treatment stage，the total pollutant reduction stage，the environmental quality improvement stage，and the green development stage. Further quantitative evaluation of the coordinated development of Shanghai’s environment and economy shows that the balance between urban environment and economy continues to increase，and the balance between environment and economy during the major events such as the World Expo is relatively high. The coordinated development of economy and environment is on a steady upward trend，rising from 0.059 in 1991 to 0.939 in 2017，indicating that the urban environment and economic system have entered a relatively high level of coordinated development. In view of the problem of insufficient imbalance in the field of environmental protection in Shanghai，we need to start from the fields of environmental protection concept，environmental protection subject，environmental protection method，environmental protection target，environmental protection space to further optimize the relationship between environmental and economic development and enhance the level of ecological environmental protection.