Abstract <p>Coal spontaneous combustion (CSC) poses a severe threat to global mining safety, resource conservation, and environmental sustainability. This paper systematically analyzes the intrinsic and extrinsic influencing factors as well as the multistage evolutionary mechanism of CSC, and comprehensively reviews the action mechanisms, research progress, and technical bottlenecks of the well-established technologies. Meanwhile, it systematically summarizes the research status and development potential of an emerging microbial technology. The results indicate that CSC is a complex process involving nonlinear coupling of intrinsic properties and external conditions. There are both synergistic and antagonistic effects among various factors, resulting in multistage evolution characteristics of the reaction path and change patterns. Conventional physicochemical technologies often rely on passive intervention methods and are difficult to achieve long-term blocking of the multistage evolution characteristics of CSC. In particular, the inhibitory effect on the microscopic free radical reaction in the initial latent stage is very weak. The emerging microbial technology can act simultaneously on the latent and self-heating full-temperature oxidation stages, fundamentally weakening the potential of CSC. From the perspective of development directions, technologies for CSC prevention and control that focus on optimizing material performance, achieving low economic costs, and minimizing pollution are more likely to attract industry attention.</p> Graphical abstract <p></p>