The allocation of carbon emission allowance (CEA) that serves as a new form of development right owing to its scarcity and publicity has been playing a prominent role in achieving the target of global temperature control proposed by the Paris Agreement. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the principles, methods, scales, and schemes of CEA allocation. Our study showed that the research on CEA allocation was dominated by the equity and efficiency principles, whereas emerging principles such as feasibility and sustainability have been increasingly adopted. CEA allocation can be fulfilled through the composite indicators method, the game theory method, the data envelopment analysis, and the hybrid method. However, all these methods are subject to specific applicability with their own pros and cons. Furthermore, the international and interregional allocation has been the main focus of the CEA studies. The former makes it difficult to form a consensus-based scheme because of the different interests of countries, while the latter is primarily narrowed down to province-wide allocation. Future research into CEA allocation is expected to comply with multi-principle and multi-method combination, spanning a wide spectrum of scales ranging from the international, interprovincial, interurban to sectoral and corporate levels. This review makes great sense by providing a theoretical basis for better understanding the state of the art in CEA allocation and undertaking scientific and feasible allocation of CEA at multiple scales. It can also serve as a reference for the target decomposition of various pollutant reduction.