The paper is concerned with the growing need to develop an over-all systems approach to the challenges facing the coal industry in the eighties. In order to do this a number of major research problems have to bo answered and these are discussed under five main liuadiugs: (a) exploration and characterization,(b) mine planning and organization,(c) operations planning and production, (d) distribution utilization, (e) corporate requirements (externalities, environmental and institutional). Finally, the paper considers ways in which these research problems, which are not easy to undertake either within an industrial firm or in a university, can be tackled. The paper concludes with a discussion of an international collaborative project ‘Coal: Issues for the Eighties’ which is being, undertaken at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.