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The world is facing the challenges of climate change and energy structure adjustments. The role of digital nance, a new branch of business that combines digital technology and traditional nancial products, in reducing global carbon emissions needs to be studied. This paper uses panel data on 280 cities in China from 2011 to 2019 to empirically examine the e cacy of digital nance for governing carbon emission reductions and the mechanism by which it does so. The results show that: 1. digital nance can facilitate carbon emission reductions and help reduce carbon emission intensity within regions.2. Digital nance helps promote the rational allocation of resources and alleviates factor distortions by encouraging rms to rationally use their own factor endowments so as to reduce carbon emission intensity, which holds robustly after considering the endogenous issues such as possibly omitting variables, collinearity and so on. 3.Differences in geographical location, the vitality of regional innovation and entrepreneurship, regional willingness to protect the environment, and environmental protection levels lead to heterogeneity in the effect of digital nance on carbon emission intensity. Therefore, it is necessary to vigorously develop digital nance as a long-term tool for carbon governance.

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