Aaratrica Kashyap and Shefali Sharan | July 2024
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Executive Summary
Coal production and consumption are under pressure worldwide. This pressure is
largely due to the need to address climate change, or concerns about coal’s economic viability, or both. In the United States, coal production has fallen by 47% since 2001 owing in large part to competition from natural gas and renewables.
In India, a commitment to coal phase-down has been made, but its production and consumption continue to grow rapidly to meet development needs—conservative estimates put annual coal production at 1.3 billion tons by 2030, i.e. a 300 million ton increase in current production levels.
Addressing climate change successfully may require shuttering hundreds of coal mines and power plants globally, affecting coal-reliant communities on an unprecedented scale. For these communities, managing the sector’s decline is an enormous—and often existential—undertaking.
To address this challenge, policymakers and scholars worldwide have proposed and enacted frameworks and mechanisms for a ‘just transition’ of coal-reliant communities, to mitigate the economic losses of coal decline. Diversification of coal-dependent economies is a goal often included in these just transition proposals meant to reduce coal dependencies and create more local economic resilience.