Excessive emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases will lead to a series of environmental problems such as global warming. It is of great significance to monitor greenhouse gases. Countries around the world are actively carrying out greenhouse gas monitoring and emission reduction work. Although Chinese greenhouse gas monitoring work and technology started later than that of foreign countries, in recent decades, Chinese monitoring technology, especially optical monitoring technology, has developed rapidly. Spectroscopy has become an important method to monitor greenhouse gases in China and has been applied in multiple scenarios and fields. Through various detection methods such as atmospheric background observation, ground emission monitoring, ground-based observation and high-altitude detection, the spatiotemporal variation and source and sink information of greenhouse gases could be obtained to help understand the environmental effects of greenhouse gas changes, and provide data support for the control and emission of greenhouse gases. In order to deal with the environmental problems caused by excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, it is essential to reduce carbon emissions in human production and life. To this end, Chinese governments and organs at all levels have issued a number of relevant policies and put forward various emission reduction measures for different industries such as industry, transportation and agriculture, and achieved certain emission reduction results.