Tuber crops while cabbage,wild brassica/cabbage , garlic, shallot, onion are among the important home garden grown horticultural crops along with sugarcane, green chilli and capsicum. Only during recent years, many women folks also adopting growing wild/semi wild herbal spices in their home gardens for marketing. Other important component in the traditional system gaining importance during recent years was identified as home/agro-forestry—very wide range of plant types for diverse uses getting prominence like guava and mango  for marketing and home consumption; also an array of domestic animals are increasing especially chicken with higher market prices of eggs and live birds. In the study area, though farming is the primary occupation for 81% of the sample household heads, a significant proportion has to combine some types of non-farming income sources into their livelihoods like a range of off-farm income earning activities, including paid employment, day laborer, petty trade; or move away to seek a livelihood elsewhere .

The high degree of dependence on farming activities calls for major adaptation to happen in the farming sector as this sector is directly affected by climate change. This however, is not a good strategy, as agricultural investments are proved to reduce poverty more than investments in any other sector;in developing/developed countries, agricultural research provides returns of 20 to 80 per cent—a great investment in any economy.In order to understand the impact of climate change at the local level, it is important to recognize the interactions between climate change and wider development pressures, because people mostly adapt to the impact of climate change simultaneously with other wider development related issues, such as rising food prices, hunger/malnutrition, the spread of disease/illness and competition over natural resources. It is also true that the impacts of climate change are not likely to be the same for all, the vulnerability to the impacts of climate change often comes from vulnerability in a general sense, like from poverty and marginalization. So, it makes little practical sense to talk about how people adapt to climate change in isolation, since adaptation is driven by a range of different pressures acting together. Supporting local adaptive capacity cannot, therefore, be seen in isolation as “climate change programming’.

Widespread poverty through the mountain communities of the Highlands continues to be a major factor in food insecurity which is already a fact of life here, where the harsh climate, rough terrain, isolated villages, poor soils, high soil erosion and short fluctuating growing seasons often lead to low agricultural productivity, lost harvest and food deficits.Thus, climate change and extreme weather events like droughts, cloud bursts and flush floods are very likely to impact food security in the Highland regions particularly hard. Here, community participation and main streaming climate adaptation issue into other programs are highly desirable. The livelihood activities that were already adopted, supported and significantly contributed to climate change adaptation should be identified and incorporated in strategies by the government and other agencies.In 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon assembled a team for suggestions regarding ending world poverty, recommended to “build resilience and reduce deaths from natural disasters” as the intensity of natural disasters is expected to increase with climate change.

For example,Potato, a poor farmers crop in many developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, has likely to have more diseases and less production under climate-change induced stress, as suggested the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research  report in 2012. Even at high altitudes like the study site,late blight can have a devastating impact due to increased temperatures. Also likely to be affected, another homestead horticultural crop of the small farmers in Ethiopia, the production of coffee affected by soil erosion and rainfall changes, rising temperatures will increase the plant’s vulnerability to pests and fungal diseases as predicted by the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International  researchers. Rice is the staple food grain crop for the people of Bangladesh, which provides about 370 kcal energy from 100 g grains. In this country about 84% cropped area is used for rice cultivation, with total annual production 33.89 million metrictons. Bangladesh has a monsoon climate as well as hot humid subtropical climate with a four-month wet season and an eight-month dry season.

The main rice growing seasons in Bangladesh are known as a man or wet season, aus or spring season and boro or dry season which is fully irrigated. Irrigated dry season boro rice is the main crop which is the highest yielding of the three rice seasons . BBS  gives the average yield figures for boro rice as 3.86 tonnes/ha when sown with high-yielding conventional varieties, and an average of 4.75 tonnes/ha when sown with hybrid varieties.The average yield of rice in Bangladesh is about 3.0 t ha−1, which is very low.Irrigation water supply is the prime requirement for sustainable rice farming, especially in the dry boro season, however, water scarcity is a vital problem for dry boro season rice production. In Bangladesh, irrigated boro rice cultivation mainly contributes to total rice production in the country.