Household adaptation responses of land use to environmental stresses have become the focus of climate change and sustainability science. This paper reviews the determinants of householdsadaptive capacity, the barriers for adaptation responses, and the assessment on ecological and environmental consequences of household adaptation to environmental stressors of land utilization. The approaches of household adapting environment are presented, involving composite index method, participatory rural assessment, statistic and econometric model, and adaptive co-management model. Some problems are proposed for further study in need of trans-formative adaptation: 1) Theoretically, building the theoretical framework of adaptation to supply theoretical support for empirical research; 2) more attention be paid to the assessment of ecological and environmental consequences of household adaptation practices and policies for improving adaptive capacity, which providing scientific basis for sustainable adaptation; 3) to explore the mechanism of household adaptation process of land use across multiple actors; and 4) to construct adaptive co-management model of household to environmental stresses involved multiple actors on the basis of systematic ideas, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, and present methodologies for realizing the combination of qualitative and quantitative research.