## 1 Introduction  
Water is an essential element for the survival of life, economic growth, and development of the agricultural industry [1]. However, rapid population growth, urbanization, and industrialization have exerted unprecedented pressure over this limited resource. In addition to scarcity, the contamination of water resources is another chronic threat. To overcome future water stresses, the assessment of future trends and the availability of sustainable quantities of water resources at local to global scales has become inevitable [2]. Sustainable water resource management needs to analyze and quantify several hydrological processes taking place within the watershed [3]. Land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes affect these hydrological processes, so LULC practices and water resource management are closely related [4]. Unplanned LULC change remains a critical challenge for society, which seriously threatens the global environment and can result in severe impacts on human livelihood [5]. Anthropogenic effects have markedly modified global eco-systems. These rapid changes can be seen as the results of socio-economic development, population growth, and deforestation for the expansion of cities [6]. Anthropogenic forcing mainly includes the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), as well as land-use/land-cover changes [7]. Climate change and land-use change have played a major role in building stress over the water resources of the La Boung River Basin in the south of Vietnam, where a significant decrease in number of wet days and annual streamflow has been found using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model [8]. Evidence suggests that human activities have significantly imbalanced the hydrological cycle, resulting in the frequent occurrence of extreme events [9]. Flood risks due to distinct environmental changes and human activities have created huge concerns for climate change experts [10]. Frequent extreme precipitation events have caused severe floods, leading to runoff [11]. Global warming-altered precipitation and temperature patterns could have a significant impact on the local hydrological cycle [12]. Changes in the hydrological cycle result in the alteration of stream water flow patterns. Other factors that modify stream discharges are retardation of infiltration and evapotranspiration processes [13]. Changes in LULC were shown to decrease evapotranspiration losses, resulting in a 15% increase in water yield from 1994-2014 and a 40% increase is predicted during the period 2014-2029 in the upper Citarum watershed, Indonesia [14]. Future hydrological projections for the Upper Indus Basin have indicated high flows in spring and winter with low values of annual recurrence intervals, increasing the possibility of future flood hazards in the Upper Indus Basin [15]. Hydrological models have been widely used by researchers to evaluate the impact of climate change on the hydrological regimes. These tools help to quantify several hydrological parameters such as streamflow, run-off, evapotranspiration, and water yield. Computation of these hydrological parameters and selection of hydrological tools are critical in evaluating the present and future impacts of climate change [2; 16]. Due to the wider application of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), it was selected to simulate the hydrological parameters under current and future climate at a basin-scale [17; 18; 19]. SWAT has already been successfully applied, at a basin-scale, to study water quality and water quantity under a wide range of environmental conditions around the globe. The main benefit of choosing SWAT is its modular implementation, where processes can be represented by parameters in the model and can be run with a minimum number of parameters [20; 21]. Distributed hydrological models are associated with some degree of uncertainty, due to the poor quality of the input data and conceptual simplification of environmental processes [22; 23].