Earth ArXiv preprint
Climate events like droughts are projected to become more patterned over time – more frequent and temporally clustered, and more spatially extensive. This patterning is likely to exhaust locally enacted adaptations for households, like savings and sharing among neighbors, favoring non-locally enacted adaptations instead – like remittances, or receiving money and goods from elsewhere, which can support adapting in place. For six countries in sub-Saharan Africa, we examine whether drought severity, frequency, temporal autocorrelation, and spatial extent predict households’ use of remittances. We find that both the average severity and average spatial extent of droughts over the previous five years predict households receiving a remittance, an effect driven largely by remittances from household members who moved more than five years ago. In other words, households may be attending not only to the average severity of droughts, but their spatial patterning, and responding using an adaptation that could reach beyond the extent of the drought. Estimating the effects of patterned events on household strategies will be key to supporting adaptation going forward.