Household climate adaptations reflect patterning in climate events

Anne Pisor , Danielle Touma, Johanna Hope Jared, James Holland Jones

It is well-documented that households respond to climate events with climate adaptations, risk-management strategies like livelihood diversification, migration, or remittances – sending money and goods across distances. However, the focus is largely on responses to single climate events, while suggestive evidence indicates that temporal and spatial patterns across multiple events – including event frequency, clustering, and spatial extent – predict which climate adaptations households use. Here, we assess whether households that have experienced not just more severe droughts, but more frequent, temporally autocorrelated, or spatially extensive droughts across recent years, are more likely to have received a remittance over the last 12 months. We analyze remittance data from 2009 from 11,776 households across six sub-Saharan African countries, matching it to satellite and weather station data on precipitation and evapotranspiration (1981-2009). We find that average severity and average spatial extent of drought over a five-year window predict receiving a remittance; these effects are largely driven by remittances from household migrants, especially those who moved more than five years ago. In short, to predict what adaptations households will use in the face of climate events like drought, researchers should consider not just single events, but patterning across events; doing so will help us better anticipate and support adaptations like remittances given future climate projections.