Rural–Urban Metabolism: A Methodological Approach for Carbon-Positive and Circular Territories

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

The research presented in your manuscript is interesting. I do have some comments, suggestions and questions:

1.       in section 3.1 there is a double definition of biocapacity, yield factor (misspelled in the first instance at the end of page 4) and equivalence factor. One definition should be enough.

2.       in reference 3 you misspelled Taschen (Tashen)

3.       the presented results are very interesting but hard to follow. If possible, supplementary materials containing input data would be very useful with some summary given in the article itself

4.       the Trentino area is a tourist area. You mentioned that tourist info has been included in the mobility map. What is the impact of tourist activities on the overall results, are there any seasonal changes impacted by tourists (possible higher transport footprint in the winter or summer), the CO2 equivalent is given per citizen but it is calculated taking into account the tourists? Please comment.

Please comment the robustness of the RUM method in regard to permanent inhabitants of the area and temporary inhabitants, like tourists or seasonal workers (labour migrations)

Author Response

We thank you for reviewing our contribution and for your thoughtful and constructive insights and comments. We addressed all the specific technical comments suggested by the reviewers, taking advantage of them to improve the paper, and specifically:

• We have clarified and rewritten the introduction, pointing out the relevant issues that we have tried to tackle within our article, with a simpler and clearer style;
• We have widened the section “1. Introduction” by adding a new paragraph that, with the support of a deep literature review reference, outlines the research gap; 
• We have modified the methodological approach to make it clearer and wider, providing more relevant references and better explaining the operative steps and procedures;
• We have better specified the connection between results and discussion; 
• We have transformed and widened the section “5. Discussion and final considerations” by adding a new paragraph that critically outlines the most significant achievements of our work in relation to the background that we have sketched at the beginning of the article; 
• We have added some schemes to better explain the methodological process and updated and integrated the figures’ descriptions to improve their effectiveness;
• We have in-depth revised the English grammar, writing, and spelling throughout the text and improved the text flow by deleting repetitions, redundancies and mistakes. 

In particular, regarding your suggestions, we have corrected the redundancy, as you can see in lines 253-254. We moved the paragraph earlier (231–249) to clarify the methodology.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Overall, it a very interesting topic and it surely deserved attention. However, the description is quite lengthy in words and complex. Maybe more graphical illustrations would help to understand the approach. Also the results discussion would benefit from a comparison. It is in the end not clear what could be improved to make the overall picture better. Please provide more concrete conclusions.

Author Response

We thank you for reviewing our contribution and for your thoughtful and constructive insights and comments. We addressed all the specific technical comments suggested by the reviewers, taking advantage of them to improve the paper, and specifically:

• We have clarified and rewritten the introduction, pointing out the relevant issues that we have tried to tackle within our article, with a simpler and clearer style;
• We have widened the section “1. Introduction” by adding a new paragraph that, with the support of a deep literature review reference, outlines the research gap;
• We have modified the methodological approach to make it clearer and wider, providing more relevant references and better explaining the operative steps and procedures;
• We have better specified the connection between results and discussion;
• We have transformed and widened the section “5. Discussion and final considerations” by adding a new paragraph that critically outlines the most significant achievements of our work in relation to the background that we have sketched at the beginning of the article;
• We have added some schemes to better explain the methodological process and updated and integrated the figures’ descriptions to improve their effectiveness;
• We have in-depth revised the English grammar, writing, and spelling throughout the text and improved the text flow by deleting repetitions, redundancies and mistakes.

In particular, regarding your suggestions, we have significantly reviewed the text in order to clarify the structure and make it easier to read and more coherent. In addition, we have implemented graphical illustrations to support the methodological approach.

Best regards,

A.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper has its merit to be published in the journal. It contributes to the debates on urban metabolism by proposing an insight into analyzing urban-rural relationships. However, I believe that there is still room for improvement. (Please see attached document).

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We thank you for reviewing our contribution and for your thoughtful and constructive insights and comments. We addressed all the specific technical comments suggested by the reviewers, taking advantage of them to improve the paper, and specifically:

• We have clarified and rewritten the introduction, pointing out the relevant issues that we have tried to tackle within our article, with a simpler and clearer style;
• We have widened the section “1. Introduction” by adding a new paragraph that, with the support of a deep literature review reference, outlines the research gap;
• We have modified the methodological approach to make it clearer and wider, providing more relevant references and better explaining the operative steps and procedures;
• We have better specified the connection between results and discussion;
• We have transformed and widened the section “5. Discussion and final considerations” by adding a new paragraph that critically outlines the most significant achievements of our work in relation to the background that we have sketched at the beginning of the article;
• We have added some schemes to better explain the methodological process and updated and integrated the figures’ descriptions to improve their effectiveness;
• We have in-depth revised the English grammar, writing, and spelling throughout the text and improved the text flow by deleting repetitions, redundancies and mistakes.

Regarding your specific suggestions, we traced the responses to the reviewers' comments punctually in the manuscript. For simplicity's sake, below are the main changes that were made.

The introduction has been clarified and rewritten, highlighting the essential topics that we have attempted to address in our essay in a simpler and clearer manner. We added a new sentence to make the urban-rural relationship more explicit, and we added a new paragraph that, by referring to an extensive literature review on urban metabolism, identifies a clear research gap and includes our position.

In the section “Materials and methods", we argued our methodological choice between “Material Flow Analysis” and “Energy Equivalence”. The methodological approach has been altered to make it clearer and wider, with more pertinent references and better explanations of the operational phases and procedures. Moreover, we clarified the use of quantitative, qualitative, and cartographic data. 

In the section “5. Discussion and final consideration," we introduced a new paragraph that critically summarizes the most important accomplishments of our work in connection to the context that we outlined at the beginning of the article. We have expanded and clarified Section 5 by strengthening the relationship between our position on the research gap, discussion, and outcomes.

Best regards,

Angelica