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The National Forest City policy in China is inextricably linked to the country’s low-carbon development and its economic and social green transformation. In this paper, the policy is employed as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact of Forest City Construction (FCC) on carbon emission intensity. This paper uses the statistical yearbook data published on the official website of the government, based on the carbon emission intensity of 268 cities in China in the 19 years from 2003 to 2021, and uses the multi period double difference (DID) model for analysis. The findings of the study indicate that: FFC significantly reduces urban carbon emission intensity by increasing the level of green living of residents, the level of green production of the society, and the level of green innovation, and its effect is heterogeneous at the level of geography and urban development status, and temperature and precipitation, as well as the level of urban informatization and the rationality of industrial structure, all have a positive moderating effect on it. The results of this paper show that urban forest construction significantly reduces the intensity of urban carbon emissions and improves the environmental benefits of economic construction. Compared with the existing studies focusing on a single path of emission reduction, there is a lack of systematic integration of multiple mechanisms such as “direct carbon sequestration, indirect transformation and policy coordination”. The innovation of this paper is to focus on the multi-dimensional environmental benefits brought by forest city construction, summarize the existing literature research focus, innovatively establish the three-dimensional impact mechanism of production, life and innovation, make up for the deficiency of existing studies paying insufficient attention to the multi-path synergy effect, build a more comprehensive and systematic analysis framework, and provide a new perspective and ideas for the study of low-carbon city construction.