Managing risk and reaping rewards: Climate-change futures as a game-changer for energy futures markets

Abstract

Climate-change futures provide a platform for low-carbon portfolios and energy market risk hedging. Climate changes induce uncertainty in energy-commodity markets. We investigate the potential of diversifying and hedging energy-commodity market risk with climate-change futures, using dynamic conditional correlation (DCC)-ordinary least squares (OLS) incorporating quantile-dummies and cross-quantilogram (CQ) approaches. DCC-OLS models reveal that the World and USA climate-change futures exhibit that they can be diversifiers for oil, ethanol, gasoil, and gasoline. These futures also exhibit hedging features for natural gas, coal, and heating oil. Euro climate-change futures demonstrate hedging capabilities for all energy commodities except oil and gasoil. World, USA, and Euro climate-change futures have the potential to serve as safe-haven financial instruments in the face of the high volatility of Brent crude oil, gasoil, and heating oil. The CQ reveals that World, USA, and Euro climate-change futures exhibit hedging and safe-haven capacity against oil, natural gas, coal, gasoil, gasoline, and heating futures. Climate-change futures may protect financial investments during extreme volatility in energy commodities.