Abstract: Energy, metallurgy, building materials, chemicals and other heavy industries have been developing fast in China in recent years. Correspondingly, the resources & environmental impacts become more and more serious, so the new spatial framework as well as stricter regulations are very necessary. However, the current regionalization such as natural division, sector division, economic division and functional division can hardly be applied to policy-making for the fixed industries. Accordingly, the "one size fits all policies" widely existed in environmental management. To make the policies more suitable to regional resources & environment capacity, the concept of environmental management zones for industries has been brought forward and practiced in coal mining of Inner Mongolia. For the zonation, indices of ecological sensitivity, water resources sensitivity and arable land sensitivity are constructed. The ecological sensitivity is graded into three levels according to Analytical Hierarchy Processes and Grey Fixed Weight Clustering analysis. The water resources sensitivity is graded into three levels according to the weighted sum of sub-indices. The arable land sensitivity is defined as the ratio of arable land to the county or city and the most sensitive areas are extracted. By combining the grades of the above indices, Inner Mongolia is classified into four types of zones at the countylevel except to the forbidden exploitation areas which are represented by the main nature reserves. Based on that, the resources conditions, development status and the main environmental constraints for coal mining in each type of the zones are depicted, the recommendations for environmental management are raised.