he energy consumption dominated by fossil fuels not only causes serious air pollution, but also generates a large amount of CO2, exacerbating climate degradation. Reducing pollution and carbon emissions has become a major strategic requirement for global green and highquality development. Among them, the utilization of CO2 resources can not only reduce environmental pollution, but also generate the carbonbased products by its reduction, which are often important chemical intermediates with great application value, therefore, the preparation of carbonbased products by CO2 reduction has become a hotspot of current research in the field of energy and environment. At present, CO2 catalytic reduction methods mainly include thermal catalysis, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, photothermal catalysis and photoelectrocatalysis, etc. Among them, the photothermal coupling of lightdriven photothermal synergistic catalytic technology not only overcomes the deficiencies of a single catalytic technology, but also gives full play to the advantages of the two, and realizes the preparation of carbonbased compounds from CO2 reduction with high efficiency and selectivity under the condition of low (no) energy consumption, which is an ideal reduction pathway. The paper provides an overview of the classification, mechanism, and optimization design of photothermal catalysis for CO2 reduction and also discusses the industrial application and existing problems of photothermal catalysis for CO2 reduction. Finally, the future development of photothermal catalysis for CO2 reduction technology is discussed.