TY - JOUR
T1 - Coal reliance, human development, and gender equality: At what scale should we look for a relationship?
AU - Pasaribu, Donny
AU - Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1016/j.erss.2022.102612
DO - 10.1016/j.erss.2022.102612
M3 - Article
VL - 90
SP - 1
EP - 18
JO - Energy Research & Social Science
JF - Energy Research & Social Science
ER -