Coal reliance, human development, and gender equality: At what scale should we look for a relationship?

Reliance on coal is crucial to understand in energy transition, but different countries rely on coal in different ways. The reliance is not only on coal production that provides for employment and economic output, but also for export revenues and consumption. This paper presents the results of a research to develop a Coal Reliance Index (CRI) that combine the measurements of production, consumption, and external reliance on coal. The CRI helps us to compare between coal-producing countries, and correlate coal reliance with social indicators such as the Human Development Index (HDI) and Gender Development Index (GDI) at a country level. The research found that the lack of sex-disaggregated data on coal employment is a major hindrance to correlate coal reliance with social and gender indicators. The paper concludes that although at the macro-scale we did not find any relationship between CRI and gender in/equality, the exercise was valuable in that it points us to explore the possibility of such relationship at the regional and/or community/household scales. We conclude that this finding—that as gender issues need to be dealt at the micro-level where each context varies from the other—is an important outcome of the quantitative exercise.