New Policy Approaches for Increasing Response to Climate Change in Small Rural Municipalities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is well-prepared and deals with topical issue-climate change mitigation issues on local level however paper needs improvement. The abstract should be better structured: problem, goal, findings, policy implications. In introduction the novelty and input should be more highlighted and in the end of introduction the structure of paper should be provided. The section on discussion is necessary in order to compare results of this study with other studies conducted in this field. Conclusions should be made more concise. Irrelevant information should be deleted. Policy implications from study conducted need to be highlighted.

Author Response

Thanks for the feedback and useful hints. We considered them as follows: 

Reviewer remark: The abstract should be better structured: problem, goal, findings, policy implications.

Revision: we revised the abstract and follow now the proposed structure. By this the abstract is a bit shorter and we hope clearer.

Reviewer remark:  In introduction the novelty and input should be more highlighted and in the end of introduction the structure of paper should be provided. 

Revision: we added at the end of the introduction (line 77 - 83) some sentences to highlight our input and added a paragraph (84-91) providing a short overview about the structure of the paper.

Reviewer remark:  The section on discussion is necessary in order to compare results of this study with other studies conducted in this field.

Revision: we see the point and agree, that a discussion always should create a link to existing research results. So we have several cross-references in the discussion section. As the literature review showed, there are really only few studies which might be comparable. But we thank for the remark an controlled again each subsection and found in the subsection "Fields of action and climate policies" a really missing relevant paper, which we added. Thanks.

Reviewer remark: Conclusions should be made more concise. Irrelevant information should be deleted.

Revision: we deleted irrelevant / not needed information. We hope that this also supports a better conciseness.  

Reviewer remark: Policy implications from study conducted need to be highlighted.

Revision: Thanks for this point. We improved the layout to highlight the 3 policy implications. By this they can be detected now at the first view. 

 

Again we thank the reviewer for his useful and substantial comments. 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

This article evaluates the commitment of small and medium sized municipalities in the Bavarian region of Germany to climate change, namely the perception that the municipality is affected by climate change and if climate change is in the municipality’s agenda.

The paper is very well written and the literature review is extensive and recent.

The method is sound and the results are clearly presented and summarized in the conclusions.

Overall the quality of the paper is good. The paper is innovative since it tries to quantify the level of climate change awareness and commitment of municipalities. Therefore, the paper maybe considered for publication after inclusion of the questionnaire used by the study.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his very kind and positive review. At the end of the review he made the remark: 

Therefore, the paper maybe considered for publication after inclusion of the questionnaire used by the study.

We attach the questionnaire as a printout of the original online version. The questionnaire is in German and we do not have any reservation to publish it. To make it readable to everybody there would be the need to translate it. It is a long questionnaire and we would be more than happy, if the effort of translation could be avoided. But of course we are willing to provide a translation, if this is the wish. But this will take some days as the document has 18 pages.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a very interesting article. Apart from a few minor corrections to the English, my only concern is with the emphasis on municipality endeavours and initiatives to develop appropriate policies and actions.

In my experience (not principally in Europe),  critical actions in the territories in which my research teams have undertaken studies were initially undertaken by farmers (in the agriculturally rural areas) and in other rural areas, key initiatives in terms of building co-resilience has been initiated  by a range of different types of citizens to cope with flooding.

It was not the municipalities which undertook these initiatives, but the municipalities supported what the farmers and other citizens took actions for.

But the article is non the less very interesting. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his very positive review. To improve the article ("apart from a few minor corrections to the English") we asked a native Britain colleague to control again. He found some smaller mistakes we corrected and hope, that language quality now is fine. 

Concerning the general comment of the reviewer 

"my only concern is with the emphasis on municipality endeavours and initiatives to develop appropriate policies and actions.

In my experience (not principally in Europe),  critical actions in the territories in which my research teams have undertaken studies were initially undertaken by farmers (in the agriculturally rural areas) and in other rural areas, key initiatives in terms of building co-resilience has been initiated  by a range of different types of citizens to cope with flooding.

It was not the municipalities which undertook these initiatives, but the municipalities supported what the farmers and other citizens took actions for."

we agree totally, that at global level we see many regions where climate change leads to threats of existential dimension. Often these regions are very remote or in relative poor countries with dysfunctional administrative systems outside the capitals and large cities. Therefore we added in the section 6, limitations an additional paragraph (liens 542 ff.) explaining this point, as it is very important. Thanks for this very important comment.    

 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have addressed all my comments and improved their paper significantly. The paper can be published in current form as manuscript was significantly improved.

Reviewer 2 Report

I would suggest the authors to make the questionnaire reachable in the net, even if in german.