Coal consumption forecasting is the premise of energy supply structure reform and the basic work of energy planning under the background of climate change. Based on the econometrics which determines the influencing factors, this paper proposes a combined algorithm using Self-adaptive differential evolution (SaDE) algorithm and support vector (SVM) optimization algorithm for coal consumption forecasting. The optimization algorithm reduces the selection problem of SVM oversized hyperplane parameters, improves its global optimization ability, and further improves the prediction accuracy of SVM. The results of China's coal consumption forecasting show that the improved SaDE-SVM algorithm has good adaptability, robustness, faster converging speed and higher prediction accuracy for the prediction of less data samples and multiple influencing factors suitable for relevant medium and long term forecasts. The forecast shows that China's coal consumption is expected to be between 3.92 billion tons and 4.14 billion tons by 2020. By 2030, China's coal consumption will be between 2.195 billion tons and 3.699 billion tons.