Monetary transfers may be related to patterning in climate events, not just single extreme events

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 or compounding, and spatial extent – may 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 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. In short, support is mixed for our predictions about the relationship between patterned climate events and remittances. 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.