Nature-Based Solutions for Water Management in Peri-Urban Areas: Barriers and Lessons Learned from Implementation Experiences

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This article is relevant and provides insightful information coming from an extensive literature review. I had a couple of conflicts however. First, the article title and introduction implies canvasing international experiences around the world, but the key words used for the content analysis were limited to very few terms covering only European defined terms and did not consider equivalent terms used in North America, Australia and other regions. While this was somehow noted by one reference citing the different terms used in other countries and regions, it appears that the authors did not consider other key words that could have landed in a truly international experience review.

Second, the authors did omit a crucial aspect for real world evaluation of BNS: the life-cycle costs, cost-benefit, and economic feasibility of projects. There are numerous arguments against BNS type of solutions because of the cost implications in the long term. This is major barrier not clearly articulated in the article. 

I really liked the analysis done and the graphical representation of results. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We highly appreciate your comments, it has been a fruitful experience to go throughout your suggestions and the manuscript has introduced the major changes expected. Specifically, the introduction has been rewritten, the results are presented in more detail and an Appendix A has been developed to complement the review. The changes in the manuscript can be tracked, however, minor of formal changes have been accepted to facilitate your review. We have improved the figures and tables presented and we deleted two figures to avoid reiteration. In general terms, we recognize the limitation of our review due to the use of European keywords, but, we have made an effort to provide insightful information within these concepts of ‘NBS’ and ‘peri-urban’ to present our study as a review of implementation experiences. Please find attached the answers to your valuable inputs. 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

The submitted work has an interesting focus and it is quite innovative, however I major concerns about the classifications used for the analysis. Some concepts and figure used for the analysis seem totally ill-defined, according to my perception.

I have the following comments.

GENERAL COMMENTS:

1. Please check all tables and figures numbering. There are some errors, e.g. two different figures 1, two different tables 3, figure 3 is doubled, etc..
2. I suggest the authors to use one standardised framework for ES analysis, such as the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services Version 4.3, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment or TEEB classification - I am not convinced of the classification used by the authors and I think some errors are present. For example, only three class are present, while most of the classifications use 4 classes including SUPPORTING services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service - https://www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/document.300.aspx.pdf ; "Natural Habitat/shelter" ecosystem service is not a provisioning service, but a SUPPORT/REGULATING service: http://www.fao.org/ecosystem-services-biodiversity/background/supporting-services/en/. 
3. Conclusions are not informative. A clear "takeaway message" is not present (which are the main barriers? which the main lesson learnt?) and nothing is mentioned about the geographical imbalance of studies (a lot in Europe, few in Africa and South America). Authors should state also clearly which are the research gaps identified by their review.

DETAILED COMMENTS:

Line 20: I think it should be "water management peri-urban" areas.

25: No need to insert keywords which are present in the title

75: same comment of line 20

94: there is an error with a reference source that is missing. Please check this and the other occurrences of "Error! Reference source not found"

118: since only 35 references were analysed, I suggest to include a table of all references. The table should include the specific water challenges, ecosystem services, type, scale, policy and financial instruments and stakeholders considered in each paper. This will constitute a database very useful for the reader, to be used in conjunction with the graphs. The table can be in an appendix.

139-143: these lines can be shortened and/or moved to the introduction

Table 1: Why does socio-cultural services are a water challenge?

Figure 4: to me is useless, since it is not clear which ES is linked to which water challenge.

Figure 5: when seeing a circular graph like this, I assume that all the items present along the circle are of the same type, e.g. geographical areas: https://gjabel.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/circular-migration-flow-plots-in-r/. Here ES and NBS types are mixed, and I suggest something similar, showing different type of items in different ways:

However, I think authors could even think of a more informative graph also including information at lines 240-242. Indeed, it will be interesting to see which NBS are built to provide which service, but with reference to a specific zone.

Line 239: what does Source: (G.M.-G.) means? I think this artwork was made by authors.

Table 3 - line 266: I think authors can also include at which scale does the policy refer (global/regional/national/sub-national/municipal)

Line 397 - "Natwip paper, in progress" - an unpublished document cannot be cited. How editors/reviewers/readers could check it? and what if the paper, submitted, will be rejected for an error?

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We highly appreciate your comments, it has been a fruitful experience to go throughout your suggestions and the manuscript has introduced the major changes expected. Specifically, the introduction has been rewritten, the results are presented in more detail and an Appendix A has been developed to complement the review. The changes in the manuscript can be tracked, however, minor of formal changes have been accepted to facilitate your review. We have improved the figures and tables presented and we deleted two figures to avoid reiteration. In general terms, we recognize the limitation of our review due to the use of European keywords, but, we have made an effort to provide insightful information within these concepts of ‘NBS’ and ‘peri-urban’ to present our study as a review of implementation experiences. Please find attached the answers to your valuable inputs. 

We are grateful for your time and help,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

See attached. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We highly appreciate your comments, it has been a fruitful experience to go throughout your suggestions and the manuscript has introduced the major changes expected. Specifically, the introduction has been rewritten, the results are presented in more detail and an Appendix A has been developed to complement the review. The changes in the manuscript can be tracked, however, minor of formal changes have been accepted to facilitate your review. We have improved the figures and tables presented and we deleted two figures to avoid reiteration. In general terms, we recognize the limitation of our review due to the use of European keywords, but, we have made an effort to provide insightful information within these concepts of ‘NBS’ and ‘peri-urban’ to present our study as a review of implementation experiences. Please find attached the answers to your valuable inputs. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revisions from the initial draft represent a significant improvement. I did read through the revised manuscript and deem that revisions were made in a reasonable way that addresses my feedback.  One additional item for the authors to address:

Lines 104 and 108. The term "mixed methods" is typically used in research when mixing qualitative and quantitative methods. Noting that all methods used in this study are qualitative, I suggest the authors change such term to "multi-methods". 

Lines 287 to 289. These lines would fit better in the introduction. Noting that this article's objectives also included to review policy instruments applied on the individual cases found, it would make sense to introduce the need to address the governance aspect from the point of view of policy instruments. 

Line 302. Consider adding the term "operating and maintenance costs" as examples of life-cycle costs. 

Line 415. The term physical infrastructure does not correspond with the Green Infrastructure (GI) acronym. 

Line 417. The acronym GOV should be spelled out here as "public authorities". If so, the verb should change appropriately. 

Line 433. Consider adding: "operating costs" in the list of examples of economic aspects. 

In general, there are instances where the authors list terms or examples and the preposition "and" is missing before the last item listed (e.g. lines 46, 51, 78, 81). 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

the manuscript improved since my last revision, but I found some comments not assessed. I am particularly worried about your classification of Ecosystem Services, as I believe the paper is not fully following any classification, and some errors are present (e.g. Habitat, if not considered a supporting services, it DO is a regulation one).

Please see below my main comments.

 

Lines 112-114 "This review is ensuring a logical process through a descriptive search procedure and the specification of inclusion and exclusion criteria" - I think this should be removed. It is implicit/it should be judged by the reader (editors) while reading your methodology. You're not supposed to self-assess your methodology so explicitly. It may be kind of obvious that the methodology is good since you're publishing it on a IF-ranked journal - no need to over enhance it!

 

Lines 126 - 127 "selection was carried out by two people (R.P.-A. and G.M.-G.) following an outlined structure of aspects including location" - no need to specify it. The "Author Contributions" section can be used.

 

Figure 1: is too small

 

Answer to my point 10: Point 10:
"Table 1: Why does socio-cultural services are a water challenge?
Lines 168-175. Explanation included. Since the challenges included are directly related to water, but could relate to other aspects, we have delete the ‘water’
term to present all the challenges found in the literature. In addition,
the information is complemented with cases descriptions in Appendix 1 Table A2."

I found this comment not assessed. I think a real "challenge" is not explained. A challenge is an open point and I don't see which is the open point here. I would expect something like "Low consideration of socio-cultural services while implementing NBS" - this is a challenge. Please respond to this comment.

 

Answer to my point 2. Authors state to use CICES classification v5.1 for ecosystem services. I found some relevant errors in the use of the classification. If fact, at pages 22-onward of the document the authors themselves cited (https://cices.eu/content/uploads/sites/8/2018/01/Guidance-V51-01012018.pdf) it appears clear that habitat in NOT a provision ES, as wrongly shown in figure 3, but a regulating one (!).

I strongly suggest to carefully revise the ES classification used for the paper, since some errors are present. For example, "water harvesting" is NOT an ES reported in CICES v5.1 classification. If you want to use CICES 5.1, please structure your paper according to it, namely using tables in appendix 1.

 

Figure 4: it has improved, but all "columns" should be labelled

 

Lines 411-412: "This work identified as a main overall lesson learnt that NBS as a comprehensive approach implemented as a systemic response to deliver multiple benefits" I have difficulties in understanding this passage in English, please rephrase

 

Lines 415-420: these lines of the conclusion are not specific and quite general. As I suggested in my previous review, a clear take away message should be included. This can be a good takeaway message, but needs to be clearer. On the contrary, paragraph 4.2 is quite good and authors could take some elements from there and reuse them shortly in the discussion.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

thanks for considering my comments. Please excuse me for my harsh tone in the second revision, but we were at risk of publishing one paper with a big error.

The solution provided for aligning the ES framework to CICES is maybe a bit redundant, but this is how it is done in practice (namely to classify specific ES in larger macro-groups)

I like very much the new Conclusions section.

I think the paper is suitable for publication.

Best Regards