Coal Transition Vulnerability and Energy Justice Pathways to 2080: Comparative Lessons from Indonesia and South Africa

Abstract As the global energy transition accelerates, developing countries heavily dependent on coal face complex challenges in achieving energy justice. The transition will have significant implications for jobs, training, service delivery and local economic viability. Vulnerability to the transition depends on exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, which varies considerably within countries. Building on the Coal Transition Vulnerability Index (CTVI) that we developed for South Africa and Indonesia, this paper’s novel contribution is to bring the two indices together in a single structured comparison of two major Global South emerging economies, and to link the resulting vulnerability patterns to the solutions that a timely and just transition requires. Findings show that both Indonesia and South Africa have one region with extremely high exposure and sensitivity, though sensitivity is more diffuse as socio-economic benefits of coal mines and plants are more widely spread. In South Africa, the high exposure regions have relatively high adaptive capacity reflecting over a century of private and public investment related to coal mining and power generation as well as their proximity to major cities, while in Indonesia they have medium adaptive capacity due to a much younger industrial coal sector in more rural settings. Each country has data systems that the other can learn from. Looking forward, we set out three sets of solutions - responding to lock-in, institutional innovations that build adaptive capacity, and accelerating transformation through inter-regional learning, and acknowledge the tension between the speed of decarbonisation and the pursuit of justice.