Abstract: Heavy metal elements are persistent pollutants which are easy to be accumulated in the environment. Those poisonous pollutions will cause serious threats to ecological security and human health because of their long-term accumulation in environment, especially in the surface sediments. To find out the effect of social and economic development on the mangrove wetlands, correlation analysis was used to address how heavy metal contents in mangrove wetlands were affected by surrounding land use/cover types, social and economic development indicators and pollutant emission of different cities in Hainan Island. The result showed there were significantly positive correlations between Zn, Ni, Hg, and Co, indicating that those heavy metal elements may come from the same or similar sources. Furthermore, it was found that both Zn and Cu contents increased with the increasing of construction land area; Cu、Zn、Hg are significantly positively correlated with GDP, while Cu and Zn are significantly positively correlated with permanent population. All mentioned above results of correlation analysis generally showed those heavy metal elements may come from urban construction and vehicle exhaust.