Carbon Price Forecasting for Sustainable Low-Carbon Investment Decisions: A Hybrid Transformer—sLSTM Model

Under the framework of the Paris Agreement, carbon trading has emerged as a pivotal market-based instrument for achieving carbon neutrality. Following years of pilot programs, China has taken a critical step toward establishing a unified national carbon market. Consequently, accurate carbon price forecasting is essential for constructing a stable and effective carbon pricing mechanism. However, the 2017 reform of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) significantly altered the carbon price formation mechanism, exacerbating price volatility and uncertainty. This shift further underscores the urgent need for research into high-precision carbon price forecasting.Existing deep learning models struggle to simultaneously capture short-term high-frequency fluctuations and long-term evolutionary trends within complex carbon market data, a limitation that compromises their prediction accuracy and stability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Transformer-based carbon price forecasting model that incorporates an sLSTM structure. By enhancing sequence memory and state update mechanisms, this model effectively improves the capability to model both short-term volatility characteristics and long-term evolutionary patterns of carbon prices. In the data preprocessing phase, Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) is employed to perform multi-scale decomposition of carbon price sequences, effectively mitigating the issue of overlapping fluctuations across different time scales. Furthermore, the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is utilized to optimize the number of decomposition modes and the penalty factor, thereby resolving the parameter sensitivity issues inherent in modal decomposition. Experimental results on real-world carbon price datasets demonstrate that the model achieves an average coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.9862 and a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of only 0.5607%. These findings indicate that the proposed method possesses significant advantages in characterizing the complex dynamic features of time series, thereby effectively enhancing prediction accuracy.The proposed model can serve as a supportive tool for carbon-market risk monitoring and policy evaluation by identifying abnormal fluctuations and mitigating market inefficiencies caused by information asymmetry. This enhances the stability and predictability of carbon price signals as incentives for emissions reduction, enabling firms to plan abatement pathways and low-carbon investments, and strengthening the sustainable role of carbon markets in achieving carbon neutrality.