The invention provides a method for tracing pollution sources in emergency events. The method is characterized by comprising steps of 1, constructing source-quality response scene databases, to be more specific, creating fixed and mobile pollution source databases in certain ranges of river basins and hydrological scene databases of river basins where projects are located, simulating pollution statues of the project river basins due to pollutants of each pollution source under the conditions of different hydrological scenes and different emission amounts and creating the source-quality response scene databases in project regions; 2, carrying out source tracing analysis and computation, to be more specific, investigating and screening the pollution sources in the source-quality response scene databases according to feature information of the pollutants and hydrological regime information, finding out possible pollution sources which meet requirements of screening targets, constructing target libraries, analyzing pollution procedure fitting degrees of the target libraries, sorting the target libraries according to the fitting degrees, determining risk sources which possibly cause the emergency pollution accidents, and further conforming the risk sources by means of verification. The method has the advantage that the locations and the pollutant emission amounts of the pollution sources can be quickly determined by the aid of the method.