Residential Energy-Related CO2 Emissions in China’s Less Developed Regions: A Case Study of Jiangxi
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
it is required to represent study work through separating graphs not into a,b,c, d. Also it was not clear there was matching between graphs in figure 7 and figure 3 where it is not so clear that price increasing causes decreasing in energy consumption.
figure(2-c) is not clear enough so more improvements are necessary. it is too complicated and more clarification is required.
Author Response
Dear reviewer:
Thank you very much for giving us the valuable comments.
We deeply appreciate you for these comments because all of them are valuable and helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as for our research. We have studied them carefully and have tried our best to make revisions.
Kindly regards,
Yong Yang, Junsong Jia and Chundi Chen
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In the manuscript entitled "Residential energy-related CO2 emissions in China’s less developed regions: A case study of Jiangxi" by Yong Yang, Junsong Jia, and Chundi Chen, the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the residential energy-related CO2 emissions in urban and rural areas in the Chinese province of Jiangxi during the period 2000-2017 using as analytical tools the Logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) and the decoupling method.
I consider that the work is scientifically sounding, the used methodology is appropriated and the conclusions are of interest for the area, however, prior to the acceptance of this work major changes are in order. Below is the list of questions and issues that should be addressed by the authors.
1) In general the English should be slightly improved and, moreover, there are many minor typos and grammar errors that should be corrected. I will mention some or there but I recommend the authors a careful reading of the whole manuscript.
2) Line 11 (abstract), change "largest consumer" to "largest consumer of energy".
3) In lines 15-17 (abstract) the authors write "in detail, electricity>oil>natural gas>coal for urban Jiangxi and electricity>coal>oil>natural gas". After reading the whole manuscript I understood that the authors meant that the amount of used electricity is larger than that of used coal, the amount of used coal larger than the amount of used oil and so on. Please, rephrase the sentence.
4) Line 24 (abstract). Please substitute "weeny" by a most commonly used word.
5) Line 33. Please substitute the word "cataclysm".
6) Line 35. The authors refer to [5] but I consider that a more general reference should be provided too.
7) Line 47. Please substitute the word "terrific".
8) Line 60. Please explain the meaning of "IP-SDA".
9) Line 86. Change "similar"->"similarly"
10) Line 87. Please change "literatures" to "references".
11) Line 90. Change "by decoupling analysis" -> "using the decoupling analysis".
12) Line 106. "investing"??.
13) Line 123. Change "production"-> "product".
14) Line 139. Clarify "in urban and regions".
15) Section Material and Methods. I strongly recommend to move the appendices corresponding to the explanation of LMDI and the decoupling method into this section for consistency of the manuscript. Therefore it is needed to rewrite section 2.1.
16) Section 2.2. It is needed to provide the detailed references (including webpages) of all sources of data.
17) Figure 2. In the caption c) and d) are interchanged. I strongly recommend to split this figure in four pieces and to place them at the appropriated places in the test. That will help a lot the reader to follow your arguments.
18) Figure 2d. Explain in the text the difference between "consumption expenditure" and "residence expenditure". In this figure the axis corresponding to "Ratio" is not used, so delete it. In the label of the Y axis, please use RMB as currency and explicitly say that the expenditure is per capita (I suppose).
19) Sections 3.1 and 3.2 should be rewritten in a more logical way because it is really hard to follow authors arguments.
20) Figure 3. Please, explain in the text what "heat" means.
21) Figure 3. In figure insets, for clarity, do not write all the years in the x axis.
23) Line 293. For referring to the period (2010-2017) instead of "a rapid growth" I would rather say "a slightly more rapid growth".
24) Line 319. "proximate"-> "approximate".
25) Figure 5. I found very confusing the percentages you write on top of every contribution and I should admit that took me some time to understand what authors meant. As far I understand to calculate the percentage you use for the denominator the initial value of the total amount of CO2, that is why one can get negative values beyond -100% which is not easily understood. I strongly suggest to take out this information and maybe to include the absolute value of the different contributions in the figure.
26) Tables A6 and A7. Because of the same reasons exposed in point 25, I suggest to take out these two figures because they can be misleading.
27) Section 3.4. I recommend to include in the title of the subsections the abbreviation of the driving force, P, U, ED, etc to help the reader to identify the forces.
28) Tables 3 and 4. What is the meaning of "/" if the first row? I suggest to slightly modify the captions to help the reader. For table 3 use "Urban: Types and trends of various effects at different stages and average annual contribution rate in Jiangxi urban regions" and for table 4 "Rural: Types and trends of various effects at different stages and average annual contribution rate in Jiangxi urban regions".
29) In several places of the manuscript you use the word "wildly" but maybe the author mean "widely", isn't?
30) Line 506. Explain the meaning of SCE at this point, not only in the appendix.
31) I think that title of section 3.5 is wrong an first word should be "Decoupling" instead of "Decomposition".
32) Table 5. Please, explain the meaning of labels used in last column. The subindexes "i" should be removed or substituted by "urban" and "rural" for consistency.
33) Owing to what I will explain below, 38), I think that Fig 8 and section 3.5.2 should be taken out.
34) The same applies to lines 664-665. Please take out "After assessing the decoupling states, we integrated the LMDI and Tapio to further reveal what drives the different decoupling paths across urban and rural regions."
35) Line 672. Rephrase it according to 3).
36) Lines 688-694. Please take out this sentence. See 33) and 38)
37) Pages 22-23 on "Decomposition method". Please, explain the meaning of all involved variables. For example, what is Y_ie?
38) Lines 638-845. To the best of my knowledge Eq 10 is inconsistent. In other words, the way you make a decomposition analysis of the decoupling is not valid. The way it is defined D=%C/%Y is fully consistent with Ref. [28], however when defining
D_j=%C_j/%Y, with i= K, ES, EP, ...
there is a clear fault in the definition because the numerator refers to the j driving force but not the denominator, therefore it is not valid to say that D_j corresponds to the contribution of sector j to the decoupling. In my opinion Eq 10 and all the derived results from it should be taken out. Please correct me if you consider I'm wrong and please also provide some reference where other people use your definition.
39) Table A3. Several signs of columns 3 and 4 are wrong, please check ref [28] and correct.
40) I suggest to add at the beginning of caption of table A4 "Urban, LMDI additive:" to make easier the reading.
41) I suggest to add at the beginning of caption of table A5 "Rural, LMDI additive:" to make easier the reading.
42) I suggest to add at the beginning of caption of table A8 "Urban, LMDI multiplicative:" to make easier the reading.
43) I suggest to add at the beginning of caption of table A9 "Rural, LMDI multiplicative:" to make easier the reading.
As you can see there are many minor errors and inconsistencies but also a couple of important issues that should be addressed.
Once the author have considered all the above aspect I will reconsider my decision on the publication of this work in Sustainability. At this stage my recommendation in "Major revision".
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for giving us the valuable comments.
We deeply appreciate you for these comments because all of them are valuable and helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as for our research. We have studied them carefully and have tried our best to make revisions.
Thank you and best regards,
Yours sincerely,
Yong Yang, Junsong Jia and Chundi Chen
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The subject of the manuscript is of importance and of interest to the journal’s audience. However, the manuscript requires the following revisions: 1- The abstract must have description of the methodology. In addition, the use of expressions as ‘electricity>oil>natural gas>coal’ are not understandable to the reader. Please consider using descriptive sentences. 2- Avoid lump sum references (e.g., [10-14] or [7, 11, 21]). Critically review each reference individually. 3- There are several paragraph breaks through the text. 4- On page 4, lines 142 to 144, the description of the manuscript structure is not fully stated. 5- Please verify if all abbreviations are defined. In addition, add a nomenclature and abbreviation table to the manuscript. 6- Section 5 of the manuscript should be placed in Section 2 as subsection. 7- On page 9, Table 2, please test if the urban and rural columns can be transposed into rows for each good. 8- Sub-captions in Figures 4 and 5 do not require to be stated in the overall caption as these are already defined in each graph. 9- To help compare urban and rural areas, Figure 5 should have the same y-axis range for both graphs. 10- Some figures appear before being referenced in text. Please correct.Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for giving us the valuable comments.
We deeply appreciate you for these comments because all of them are valuable and helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as for our research. We have studied them carefully and have tried our best to make revisions.
Kind regards,
Yong Yang, Junsong Jia and Chundi Chen
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Once the authors have taken into account the different suggestions and comments, the manuscript has substantially improved and the changes in the organization of several sections makes the reading much easier. I consider that in its present status the manuscript is suitable for publication in Sustainability and therefore I recommend its publication.
I just have a couple o minor comments:
- An error appears in lines 299, 337 of the pdf file: "(Error! Not a valid bookmark self-reference.)"
- In Fig 7 the meaning of the right axis (ratio?) is not explained.
- In Table 8 the meaning of "D" needs to be explained. Probably the authors can refer to Eq. (8).
Author Response
Dear reviewer:
Our manuscript, "Residential energy-related CO2 emissions in China’s less developed regions: A case study of Jiangxi", has been revised according to your valuable comments and suggestions, and the response to comments is attached in this letter.
We deeply appreciate you for these comments because all of them are valuable and helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as for our research. We have studied them carefully and have tried our best to make the corresponding revisions which marked in red in the paper.
Thank you and best regards.
Yours sincerely,
Yong Yang, Junsong Jia and Chundi Chen
Corresponding author: Junsong Jia
E-mail: [email protected]
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
