Taking the Yangtze River Economic Belt as the research area, this article applies the environmental input-output model to calculate the virtual water consumption, embodied energy consumption and embodied carbon emissions of inter-provincial trade. Combined with the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, it can explore the water-energy-carbon nexus in different provinces and sectors. The results show that water, energy and carbon present significant consistency in different regions and sectors, among which the secondary industry and embodied energy-carbon have the strongest correlations.In the transfer of virtual water, embodied energy and embodied carbon,Jiangsu, Zhejiang were the hotspot areas, agricultural, construction industry and production and supply of electricity, heat, gas and water were important sectors. To future investigate water-energy-carbon nexus characteristics, the 11 provinces and cities were divided into 3 categories from the perspective of trade balance, which reveals that embodied water-energy-carbon pressure transferred from developed areas to less developed areas unequally. Therefore, the Yangtze River Economic Belt should focus on implementing the goals of water conservation, energy conservation and carbon reduction in key regions and sectors, promote low-carbon and green development of the industrial structure, and accelerate the formation of a regional collaborative governance system.