The Himalayan country of Bhutan is typically an agrarian country with about 57% of the people depending on agriculture. However, farming has been constrained by the mountainous topography and rapid changes in environmental variabilities. With climate change, agricultural production and food security is likely to face one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. The country has already been experiencing some impacts of climate change, such as crop loss to unusual outbreaks of diseases and pests, erratic rainfalls, windstorms, hail storms, droughts, flash floods and landslides annually. In 1996, rice farmers in high-altitude areas were devastated with 80–90% crop loss to blast disease. Turcicum leaf blight of maize in 2007 damaged more than 50% of the farmers’ harvest. Also, in 2008, a severe windstorm flattened all maize crops belonging to hundreds of households. These were some gruesome reminders of the impacts of climate change that continues to threaten farming in Bhutan. The current agricultural practices are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to their total dependence on monsoon rains and shorter growing periods. The mountainous topography makes the country more vulnerable due to large climatic swings in the mountainous ecosystem. Field evidences have also shown that shifts in cropping pattern are taking place across agroecologies, thus indicating that farming in Bhutan is quite stressed. Further, climate modelling outputs have projected that there is likely to be marked changes in the pattern of precipitation and upward trend in temperatures. In the mountainous topography of Bhutan, food production is a challenge and the impacts of climate change are likely to add to the burdens of farming. Since climate change impacts are already being felt, it is of paramount importance to focus on research works to understand and mitigate the impacts. The information generated from this study could contribute to both short- and long-term planning and policy development works related to food security and climate change in the near future.

Being a country in the Himalayas, Bhutan is highly prone to the vagaries of weather events that affect agricultural production and the subsequent livelihood of the people. To identify the main issues that affect crop production and the decisions of farmers, a survey was conducted in three different agro-ecosystems in Bhutan. Our key findings indicate that farming and the decisions of farmers were largely affected by different climatic and non-climatic factors. These were in descending order of importance: irrigation availability > farm labour > crop seasonality > crop damage (climatic) > land holding > crop damage (wildlife) > crop damage (diseases and pests). The most important consequences of climate change impacts were the drying of irrigation sources (4.35) and crop losses due to weather events (4.10), whereas land fallowing, the occurrence of flood and soil erosion, weed pressure and changes in cropping pattern (with mean ratings of 2.53–3.03) experienced lesser consequences. The extreme weather events, such as untimely rains, drought and windstorms, were rated as the ‘most common’ to ‘common’ occurrences, thus inflicting a crop loss of 1–19%. These confirm our hearsay knowledge that extreme weather events have major consequences on irrigation water, which is said to be either drying or getting smaller in comparison to the past. Therefore, Bhutan must step up its on-ground farmer-support system towards improving the country’s food production, whilst embracing climate smart farm technologies for adapting to the impacts of change.

The current research investigated the present and future projected distribution of rice (Oryza sativaL.) based on climatic suitability under three representative concentration pathways (RCPs) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change using maximum entropy (MaxEnt) modelling. The MaxEnt models predict that rice distribution in Bhutan will undergo major changes in terms of spatial range shift of varying magnitudes by 2060. Under the anthropogenic radiative forcing of RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, ecological space of rice is predicted to change between 1 and 43%. Major changes are likely to take place in major rice-growing ecological zones of the country. This is likely to have a negative impact on the livelihood and food security of the people as crop production might start declining due to unfavourable climatic factors. Therefore, the findings of this study could prove beneficial for forecasting focus sites requiring interventions, including future climate research, planning, policy formulation and conservation of natural resources.