Sustainable Land and Water Management is a practical, field-ready guide for anyone working where land and water risks are rising—smallholder farmers in semi-arid and tropical regions, watershed and landscape restoration teams, urban stormwater and WSUD practitioners, and the policymakers and programs that support them. The book starts at the beginning: what “sustainable” actually means when you are managing soils, rainfall, runoff, rivers, and aquifers under pressure. You will learn to see farms, rangelands, forests, watersheds, and cities as one connected system—where decisions upstream shape livelihoods, flood risk, water quality, groundwater recharge, and ecosystem health downstream. Clear explanations, plain-language summaries, and step-by-step exercises build confidence fast, from drawing your first land–water system diagram to running a simple water balance and reading landscape signals of erosion, compaction, and degradation. From there, the book moves into application. Instead of listing techniques in isolation, it is organized around real problems you need to solve: increasing infiltration and soil water storage, managing runoff and reducing floods, designing irrigation that improves outcomes without driving overuse, addressing drainage and salinity, sustaining groundwater through recharge and governance, restoring rangelands and grazing systems, and integrating trees through agroforestry and riparian buffers. Urban and peri-urban chapters translate the same principles into water-sensitive design—green infrastructure, infiltration systems, pollutant pathways, and heat-island dynamics—so land and water management makes sense from field to city. The final sections focus on how SLWM operates in practice: establishing baselines, selecting indicators, planning with communities, handling power dynamics and conflict, building the economic case, navigating tenure and governance, using beginner-friendly mapping and digital tools, and managing projects from pilots to scale. Monitoring and evaluation chapters show how to measure what matters, create learning loops, detect unintended impacts, and report results that work for both communities and funders. A capstone project then walks you through building a complete SLWM plan—diagnosis, stakeholder strategy, intervention packages, implementation, budgeting, and an adaptive monitoring framework—so you finish with a “ready-to-use SLWM dossier.” Designed to take beginners to proficiency, every chapter includes practical features such as key terms, mechanisms, context fit, common failure modes, field exercises requiring minimal equipment, mini case studies, and skill checks. The appendices provide quick reference matrices, field methods, design checklists, monitoring sheets, and templates you can copy into real programs. If you want a single playbook that connects soil health, water security, flood resilience, food production, ecosystem services, and climate adaptation —and helps you act on that understanding—this book is built for you.