Under the influence of complex urbanization, improving the carbon emission efficiency (CEE) plays an important role in the construction of low-carbon cities in China. Based on the panel data of 283 prefectural-level cities in China from 2005 to 2017, this study evaluated the CEE by the US-SBM model, and explored the spatial agglomeration evolution characteristics of CEE from static and dynamic perspectives by integrating ESDA and Spatial Markov Chains. Then, the spatial heterogeneity of the impacts of multi-dimensional urbanization on CEE were analyzed by using the Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR). The results show that: (1) with the evolution of time, the CEE has a trend of gradual improvement, but the average is 0.4693; (2) from the perspective of spatial static agglomeration, the “hot spots” of CEE mainly concentrated in Shandong Peninsula, Pearl River Delta, and Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration; The dynamic evolution of CEE gradually forms the phenomenon of “club convergence”; (3) urbanization of different dimensions shows spatial heterogeneity to CEE. The impact of economic urbanization in northern cities on CEE shows an inverted “U” shape, and the negative impact of spatial urbanization on CEE appears in the northwest and resource-based cities around Bohai Sea. Population and social urbanization have a positive promoting effect on CEE after 2010. These findings may help China to improve the level of CEE at the city level and provide a reference for low-carbon decision-making.

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Working towards sustainable population development is an important part of carbon mitigation efforts, and decoupling carbon emissions from population development has great significance for carbon mitigation. Based on the construction of a comprehensive population development index (PDI), this study adopts a decoupling model to explore the dependence between carbon emissions and PDI across 30 Chinese provinces from 2001 to 2017. Then, the stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence and technology (STIRPAT) model is used to investigate the impact of population factors on carbon emissions. The results show that the decoupling relationship between carbon emissions and PDI has experienced a transformation from expansive negative coupling to expansive coupling and then to weak decoupling at the national level, while some provinces have experienced the same evolutionary process, but the decoupling state in most provinces is not ideal. Sending talent to western provinces and developing low-carbon supporting industries will accelerate carbon decoupling. At the national level, incorporating environmental protection into the existing education system as part of classroom teaching could contribute to carbon decoupling.