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Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emission reduction has become an important concern worldwide. During the past century, human activities have been a significant cause of the increase in the level of greenhouse gases. Past research mainly focuses on evaluating the nexus between unidimensional population factors and CO 2 emissions, while few prior studies in a developing country have reported the impact of multidimensional demographic factors on CO 2 emissions. As an initial attempt, this study investigates the short- and long-run associations between population factors, low-carbon innovation, and carbon dioxide emissions (CO 2 ) for a panel consisting of 285 cities by employing the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator under the framework of the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. Our main findings are as follows: (1) Population size and population density could increase CO 2 emissions, while population quality and low-carbon innovation were essential factors that alleviate carbon emission pressure in the long run. (2) Economic development, foreign direct investment, and industrial development were found to be factors causing the increase in carbon emissions. (3) The split-sample analysis demonstrated that the improvement of population quality still has a positive and significant long-run effect on environmental quality. Simultaneously, low-carbon innovation could realize the enormous dividends of carbon emission reduction in the long run, especially in existing relatively larger CO 2 emission areas. Finally, the paper presents important policy implications., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)