What if drought forces Yunnan to cut aluminium output again?
A Yunnan drought curtailing aluminium smelting again tightens Chinese primary supply — the move is aluminium/alumina higher on lost smelter output, partly offset by the negative China-growth demand read in the cascade. Rhymes with the 2022-23 Yunnan hydropower curtailments that repeatedly cut ~1-2Mt of capacity and supported SHFE aluminium. Forward angle: Yunnan's green-power smelters sit at China's ~45Mt capacity ceiling, so drought-driven cuts now bind against the policy cap — making Chinese aluminium structurally supply-constrained; the cleaner expression is SHFE aluminium and global premiums, not the China-internet equity legs.
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The butterfly cascade
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What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A severe drought forces Yunnan to curtail aluminum smelting again, tightening Chinese primary metal supply sharply. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Industrial demand ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.