["Review of Development Economics, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nCoping mechanisms adopted by households, when responding to shocks, have a direct impact on their short‐ and long‐term levels of destitution. Yet our understanding of these coping strategies relative to the type of shock and the impact on the poorest is dominated by literature that relies on limited observations, over rather short time periods—typically just a few years, and does not explore how household coping strategies evolve over time. Using multiple wave Ugandan household panel data, spanning 2009–2020, we are able to further understand the coping strategies of poor households and provide new insights into how different shocks and responses interplay over varying time periods. We find that the poorest households most commonly experience health and agricultural shocks with these consistently accompanied by increased adoption of erosive long term coping strategies, such as asset disposal, that can impact on the productive capacity of poor households in the short and long run. Equally, we find variance in the lag, degree and depth of coping mechanisms adopted, with smaller incidence of health, agricultural and conflict shocks resulting in large reductions of consumption, the combination of which provides important policy implications for reassessing the risk of poor households.\n"]