The rapid economic development and the continuous intensification of human activities causing various ecological and environmental problems, have posed a serious threat to sustainable development of city. For the optimization of the ecological environment of urban agglomeration, it is of great help to explore the changes of the land use of urban agglomeration, the characteristics of how its ecological carrying capacity changes, and its ecological sensitivity. These three factors above could be used as an important basis when it comes to improve the land use management of urban agglomerations. This study takes urban agglomeration in the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains as the research area, analyzes its land use change from 2000 to 2020 based on land use data, and uses the Ecological Footprint model to measure the ecological footprint and ecological carrying capacity of the study area. Combined with five ecological sensitivity factors including vegetation coverage, slope, population density, land use type, and elevation, a multi-factor comprehensive ecological sensitivity evaluation was carried out on urban agglomeration in the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains. The results show that from 2000 to 2020, the transfer of construction land and cultivated land within the agglomeration was relatively large, increasing by 107.79% and 46.45% respectively, and that the area of forest land and water area have gradually decreased. These factors reflected that during the time urban agglomeration in the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains was in the stage of rapid urbanization, where the continuous expansion of urban built-up areas posed a certain threat to some ecological production land. In such context, the per capita ecological footprint of the urban agglomeration has generally shown an upward trend, the ecological deficit of biological resources still existed, and the ecological surplus of other resources (mainly energy) has shown a shrinking trend. The highly-sensitive area of ecological sensitivity were mainly distributed in the surrounding areas of the cities, covering the area of 11.21% of the urban agglomeration, meanwhile the moderately-sensitive areas surrounded the highly-sensitive areas, accounting for 35.18% of the target area. For the future development of urban agglomeration in the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains, it is necessary to conduct an evaluation of regional ecological sensitivity, and propose different protection and utilization strategies for different ecologically sensitive zones. In the meantime, advantages of each city in the region shall be fully considered to promote the rational use of land resources and to improve the development ecologically, socially and economically.