Assessing land use and climate change impacts on agricultural watersheds in developing regions using SWAT for sustainable water management

Agricultural watershed modeling has been widely applied to assess hydrological and water quality responses to land use land cover change, climate change and best management practices (BMPs) in developing countries. This paper provided narrative-driven regional analyses with limited statistical integration for Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model performance, watershed characteristics and BMP effectiveness. By compiling 143 studies published between 2017-2025 using PRISMA research protocol and analyzing the data collection using PICO method, this study offers crucial insights for effective water resource management in agricultural water. Results indicate that medium-sized basins (10,001–100,000 km²) dominate SWAT applications, account for approximately 33% of all studies, significantly exceeding other basin size categories. This study reveals urbanization has significant effects on both water quantity and quality, the coefficient of determination (R² = 0.923) indicated a strong correlation of 92.3% between LULC and hydrological changes. Most of the studies reported satisfactory to very good results using SWAT, with the coefficient of determination (R²) and the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) more than 0.5 (R²>0.5, NSE>0.5). Furthermore, the review paper identifies BMP in series combining both structural BMPs and management BMPs for watershed protection and sustainable agricultural practise. This review is the first to provide a cross-climatic, synthesis of SWAT applications in developing countries, explicitly linking basin scale, climate regime, model reliability and BMP effectiveness. Future research should focus on data collection and calibration method for SWAT modelling, climate change projections and extreme event scenarios and long-term analysis by linking model outputs to sustainable agriculture planning. Keywords: Best management practice, climate change, hydrological analysis, land use land cover change, SWAT, water quality