Urbanization is a powerful symbol and an inevitable human economic and social development trend. This process affects carbon dioxide emissions by changing the human output and lifestyle and encroaches over the carbon sink areas by adjusting the land use types impacting the regional carbon balance. We systematically analyzed the influence of urbanization on regional net CO₂ emissions (NCE) and built a quantitative model for the impact of urbanization on NCE based on population, economy, and land use. Based on this, the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) in China has been selected as an example to measure the characteristics of the spatial and temporal evolution of NCE from 2005 to 2018 by empirically testing the contributions of population urbanization, economic urbanization, and land urbanization to the NCE changes in YREB. According to the study’s findings, the carbon-neutral pressure index of the YREB increased over the study period, with an increase in NCE from 1706.50 Mt to 3106.05 Mt. The contribution of urbanization in this process increased and subsequently decreased in an inverted U pattern with a drop in the cumulative net emission of 260.32 Mt. The inflection points of the cumulative impact of urbanization on NCE in the midstream and upstream regions occurred in 2011 and 2010, respectively. Due to the high degree of urbanization and economic growth in the downstream area, the urbanization impact demonstrated a constant reduction of NCE over the research period. In terms of sub-dimensions, the population and land urbanization effects were consistently positive, while the economic urbanization affected the NCE and displayed an inverted U pattern during the study period. If the variation in regional carbon sink space is ignored, the impact of urbanization on CO₂ emission reduction will be overestimated. We investigated the realization path of differentiated synergistic emission reduction strategies in the great river economic belts based on the empirical study on YREB.

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