Health and Environmental Co-Benefits of City Urban Form in Latin America: An Ecological Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors did an interesting work to assess the health and environmental co-benefits in Latin America. The manuscript is well organized and significant for the ecological study for urban areas. But it still needs to further improve the manuscript before publication.

 

1. There are some spelling mistakes, i.e. in line 126,129,132, they are NO₂ and CO₂ instead of NO2 and CO2. The same comments are in line 169, 181,218,227. In line 111, “12 The scattered pixels…”, and line 162 “Quick 2020.18 We age-standardized”, it seems 12 and 18 should be deleted.

2. In figure 1, what does the bracket mean? This should be noted.

3. In figure 2, what does (Ref.) mean?

4. There is no Conclusion section, the last paragraph in Discussion section is preferred to use as Conclusion.

Author Response

REVIEWER 1

The authors did an interesting work to assess the health and environmental co-benefits in Latin America. The manuscript is well organized and significant for the ecological study for urban areas. But it still needs to further improve the manuscript before publication.

1. There are some spelling mistakes, i.e. in line 126,129,132, they are NO₂and CO₂ instead of NO2 and CO2. The same comments are in line 169, 181,218,227. In line 111, “12 The scattered pixels…”, and line 162 “Quick 2020.18 We age-standardized”, it seems 12 and 18 should be deleted.

We thank the reviewer for highlighting these details. Regarding to the air pollution formulas, we have reviewed the full manuscript and changed all the numbers from all the air pollution formulas (NO2, CO2, PM2.5) to subscript. Regarding to the numbers in the text, we identified a problem with the reference manager that did not identify properly the references that were attached to those numbers. The references have been reviewed and the bibliography has been updated.

2. In figure 1, what does the bracket mean? This should be noted.

In the manuscript there is no Figure 1 and in Figure S1 there are no brackets. We assumed the reviewer is referring to Table 1. We added some extra explanations in the footnote of Table 1 explaining some of the acronyms that were not explained.

3. In figure 2, what does (Ref.) mean?

We are assuming that reviewer is referring here to Table 2, where Ref. means reference. We changed the abbreviation for the explanation in the table.

4. There is no Conclusion section, the last paragraph in Discussion section is preferred to use as Conclusion.

We used the last paragraph in Discussion as Conclusion and wrote a title accordingly.

Reviewer 2 Report

Abstract - OK

Intro - OK

2. Materials and Methods 

Why didn't the authors correlate the time intervals for the analysis of 'lack of greenness' data (2000-2016) and air pollution data (2002-2016 for PM2.5 2002-2012 for NO2)?  After all, the authors obtained air pollution data for every year between 1998 and 2016 (line 126-128).

"We used data for the years 2012–2016 for all countries, except for El Salvador, for which we used data for 2010–2014" (line 138-139) - why?

3. Results

I suggest in the description of the results also refer to the countries, not only to cities (tab. 1 and 3)

4. Discussion

This part combines elements of discussion, limitations, future research and conclusions. I propose to separate the discussion section into final remarks and expand the conclusion component.

Author Response

REVIEWER 2

Abstract - OK

Intro - OK

2. Materials and Methods 

Why didn't the authors correlate the time intervals for the analysis of 'lack of greenness' data (2000-2016) and air pollution data (2002-2016 for PM2.5 2002-2012 for NO2)?  After all, the authors obtained air pollution data for every year between 1998 and 2016 (line 126-128).

We thank you the reviewer for highlighting this detail. Regarding to ‘lack of greenness’, we clarified that for the analyses we used the mean of the period 2002-2016, which we identified it was not clarified in the previous version. Regarding to air pollution data, we have data for every year between 1998 and 2016 for air pollution in general (PM2.5 and/or NO2) but not for all the pollutants at the same time, we don’t have data for NO2 after 2012.

The reason why we decided to use the time interval of 2002-2016 for the environmental outcomes is because we wanted to align the data with the dates from which we have data for the health outcomes. The chronic disease risk factors were defined using data from national health surveys. The surveys were conducted in different years in each country creating a time interval that goes from 2002 to 2016.

We included some explanations in sections “Environmental outcomes” and “Health outcomes” to clarify all these different points.

 

"We used data for the years 2012–2016 for all countries, except for El Salvador, for which we used data for 2010–2014" (line 138-139) - why?

Because that was the data available. We added a clarification in the text.

3. Results

I suggest in the description of the results also refer to the countries, not only to cities (tab. 1 and 3)

We included some text referring to the distributions by countries in the results interpretation of tables 1 and 3.

4. Discussion

This part combines elements of discussion, limitations, future research and conclusions. I propose to separate the discussion section into final remarks and expand the conclusion component.

We used the last paragraph in Discussion as Conclusion and wrote a title accordingly.

Reviewer 3 Report

This study explores the relationship between urban landscape and health/environment outcomes, stratified by other socio factors, and then clustered the co-benefits according to the landscape features. I personally think this is an interesting article. The study design and the method are solid, and the results are well explained. There are only some miner typo issues (such as the form of citation, etc.) I suggest the author to check carefully throughout the manuscript.  

Author Response

REVIEWER 3

This study explores the relationship between urban landscape and health/environment outcomes, stratified by other socio factors, and then clustered the co-benefits according to the landscape features. I personally think this is an interesting article. The study design and the method are solid, and the results are well explained. There are only some miner typo issues (such as the form of citation, etc.) I suggest the author to check carefully throughout the manuscript.  

We identified a problem with the reference manager that did not identify properly the references that were attached to those numbers. The references have been reviewed and the bibliography has been updated.