Advances in Understanding and Forecasting Commodity Market Dynamics

Dear Colleagues,

Climate uncertainty encompassing both physical uncertainty (such as extreme weather events) and transition uncertainty (arising from climate policies, technological change, and shifts in investor sentiment) has profound implications for commodity markets. These uncertainties affect commodity prices through supply disruptions and demand reallocation, amplify volatility via heightened price fluctuations and cross-market risk spillovers, and complicate the design of effective hedging and risk management strategies, including the use of futures, options, and diversified portfolios.

This Special Issue invites high-quality empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that examine the multifaceted impacts of climate uncertainty on commodity markets across all major classes, including agricultural commodities (e.g., grains and softs), energy markets (fossil fuels and renewables), metals (base and precious), and critical minerals. The scope of the Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following themes:

• Dynamic effects of climate uncertainty on commodity prices, returns, and term structures.
• Time-varying volatility, spillovers, connectedness, and tail risks across commodity markets or between commodities and other asset classes.
• The role of climate uncertainty in generating asymmetric responses, regime shifts, or extreme market conditions.
• Development, evaluation, and performance of hedging and risk management strategies under climate-driven risks.
• Comparative analyses across commodity types, regions (e.g., emerging versus developed markets), or time periods (such as pre- and post-major climate events or international climate agreements).
• The impact of climate uncertainty on firm-level outcomes, including profitability and financial performance.

The objective of this Special Issue is to advance our understanding of how climate uncertainty reshapes commodity market behaviour and to provide actionable insights for investors, producers, policymakers, and risk managers operating in an era of heightened environmental and regulatory uncertainty.

This Special Issue seeks to supplement and extend the existing literature in several important respects. Although prior research has increasingly documented the effects of climate risks and climate-related policy uncertainty, much of this work remains concentrated on energy markets. Broader coverage of commodity markets, particularly those integrating agricultural commodities and metals alongside energy, has received comparatively limited systematic attention. This gap persists despite growing evidence that physical climate shocks disproportionately affect agricultural markets, while transition risks play a central role in shaping demand and price dynamics for critical minerals. By prioritizing diverse commodity classes and explicitly linking impact analysis with risk management considerations, this Special Issue promotes a more holistic understanding of the transmission channels and mitigation mechanisms associated with climate uncertainty.

We particularly encourage submissions that employ innovative econometric and quantitative methods, utilize novel data sources (such as satellite-based climate indicators, news-based climate uncertainty indices, or high-frequency financial data), or adopt interdisciplinary perspectives that bridge finance, economics, climate science, and policy analysis.

Prof. Dr. Li Yang
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Commodities is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.