Abstract: With the increasingly strict environmental regulation policies, the impacts of environmental regulation are arouse wide concern. But the accurate measurement of environmental regulation intensity directly affect the reliability of empirical analysis. Through reviewing the current research literatures, four main methods of measuring environmental regulation intensity: pollution control investment, pollutant discharge, comprehensive evaluation and natural experiment or some alternative indicators are summarized and reviewed in this paper. Based on this, the potential multidimensionality and comparability in the measurement of environmental regulation intensity are discussed and some suggestions are provided to avoid these problems according to China’s actual environmental policies. Furthermore, applying China's regional data, the corrective environmental regulation intensity and the index without correction are compared. The result shows the potential problems have a great effect on the ranking of regional environmental regulation intensity and its changing trend. So, these problems should get enough attention in empirical analysis.