Even if no additional vows to phase out fossil fuels are made, the global coal industry might lose roughly 1 million jobs by 2050, with China and India bearing the brunt of the losses, according to new data released on Tuesday.

Hundreds of labor-intensive mines are projected to close in the next decades as they reach the end of their useful lives and governments transition away from coal in favour of cleaner, lower-carbon energy sources.

However, most of the mines that are set to close “have no planning underway to extend the life of those operations or to manage a transition to a post-coal economy,” according to the U.S.-based think tank Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

Dorothy Mei, project manager for GEM’s Global Coal Mine Tracker, stated that governments must make efforts to guarantee that employees are not adversely affected by the energy shift.

“Coal mine closures are inevitable, but economic hardship and social strife for workers are not,” she said.

GEM examined 4,300 operational and projected coal mine projects around the world, totaling almost 2.7 million workers. It discovered that almost 400,000 people are employed in mines that are scheduled to close before 2035.

GEM predicted that if plans to phase out coal were completed to minimise global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), just 250,000 miners – less than 10% of the current labour – would be required worldwide.

According to GEM, China’s coal sector, the world’s largest, employs more than 1.5 million people. More over 240,000 of the 1 million global job losses anticipated by 2050 will be in the province of Shanxi alone.

Several waves of restructuring have already occurred in China’s coal sector in recent decades, with many mining districts in the north and northeast having to find other sources of growth and employment following pit closures.

“The coal industry, on the whole, has a notoriously bad reputation for its treatment of workers,” said Ryan Driskell Tate, GEM’s program director for coal.

“What we need is proactive planning for workers and coal communities … so industry and governments will remain accountable to those workers who have borne the brunt for so long.”

(Adapted from Business_standard.com)