Low-carbon economic development is a strategy that is emerging in response to global climate change. Being the third-largest energy base in the world, Central Asia should adopt rational and efficient energy utilization to achieve the sustainable economic development. In this study, the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) decomposition method was used to explore the influence factors of CO₂ emissions in Central Asia (including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) during the period 1992-2014. Moreover, decoupling elasticity and decoupling index based on the LMDI decomposition results were employed to explore the relationship between economic growth and CO₂ emissions during the study period. Our results show that the total CO₂ emissions decreased during the period 1992-1998, influenced by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent financial crisis. After 1998, the total CO₂ emissions started to increase slowly along with the economic growth after the market economic reform. Energy-related CO₂ emissions increased in Central Asia, mainly driven by economic activity effect and population effect, while energy intensity effect and energy carbon structure effect were the primary factors inhibiting CO₂ emissions. The contribution percentages of these four factors (economic activity effect, population effect, energy intensity effect and energy carbon structure effect) to the total CO₂ emissions were 11.80%, 39.08%, -44.82% and -4.32%, respectively, during the study period. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan released great quantities of CO₂ with the annual average emissions of 189.69×10⁶, 45.55×10⁶ and 115.38×10⁶ t, respectively. In fact, their economic developments depended on high-carbon energies. The decoupling indices clarified the relationship between CO₂ emissions and economic growth, highlighting the occurrence of a ''weak decoupling'' between these two variables in Central Asia. In conclusion, our results indicate that CO₂ emissions are still not completely decoupled from economic growth in Central Asia. Based on these results, we suggest four key policy suggestions in this paper to help Central Asia to reduce CO₂ emissions and build a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society.