Climatic Change
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 in the majority of countries, average severity of drought over a five-year window is associated with receiving a remittance; these effects are largely driven by remittances from household migrants, especially those who moved more than five years ago. Spatial extent positively predicts receiving remittances in Nigeria but is a negative predictor in other countries. Results for frequency are null and for temporal autocorrelation are mixed. Systematic investigation of whether not just single events, but patterning across events, predicts household-level climate adaptations could help us better anticipate and support adaptations like remittances given future climate projections.