We construct a commodity price uncertainty index for Europe and examine its impact on economic activity (like industrial production and inflation) and its relative importance as a leading indicator for real and monetary developments. We consider total commodity uncertainty and, conditional on data availability, also commodity uncertainty for certain commodity subcategories, e.g., energy, industrial metals and agriculture. We perform a number of empirical analyses, including impulse response and forecasting analyses, for the euro area, where we also allow for regime dependent dynamics, conditional on high/low commodity price uncertainty. We perform selected empirical analyses also for Austria.