Agricultural Carbon Emissions Embodied in China’s Foreign Trade and Its Driving Factors

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please check the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful suggestions. We have made the appropriate changes and explained them accordingly.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I was excited to read this paper because I’m quite interested in how production and consumption of agricultural products contribute to (or potentially, mitigate) climate change.  While I suspect that this paper will eventually be a rich source of information, it needs some language and organizational improvements before it can be accepted.  I am an agricultural climate change and carbon cycle scientist, and I can’t really evaluate the paper currently, because it is entirely focused on accounting and economics, with very little context outside of those fields.   Why submit to the journal Sustainability with absolutely no context for how alleged improvements (I assume, reductions in emissions quantities per unit product) have been achieved?    I would be happy to review again IF the authors can make it very simple and easy for me to follow the numbers, plus add a lot of context regarding actual changes over time in products, trade, agricultural techniques, and emissions.   

My first issue is the large number of abbreviations, many not clearly defined.  I need a box or side table listing and defining the abbreviations that I can refer to while reading.  Then, a clear indication of what it means to import or export ACE, in terms of where the product was grown and consumed, and what emissions are attributed to which countries. What goes into calculating ACE?  Does it change over time, e.g. is a bushel of wheat in 1961 associated with the same amount of ACE as recently? There is no mention of what actual products are imported and exported, or especially what changes in agricultural production and consumption have led to ACE per unit of production, export, and/or import.  I am yet not that clear on what the goal of the research was.  I would really like these authors to rewrite this manuscript with the goal of making it easier for the reader to follow their message.   How are they adding value to the already existing FAO and other datasets they relied on?   

Abstract and elsewhere, the word ‘deepening’ is used, but the meaning is not clear—e.g. here ‘We 15 found that, the impacts of globalization on China's ACE are gradually deepening.’ Is this to show that globalization is increasing ACE?  And is that at a national level, or per capita, or per unit of food production or calories or monetary value?

Definition of terms—e.g. EORA not defined at first usage or anywhere (line 118).   A list of abbreviations would be helpful.  Also, what does it mean to import or export ACEs?  If China imports alfalfa grown in the US, how are the emissions qualified associated with fertilizers, tractors (in the US), shipping, and methane emissions of the cattle ultimately eating it in China?  It is hard to know what exactly is being tracked, and why is the attribution of ACEs important?

Line 177 what is agricultural output value? Is it just the total agricultural productivity including quantities consumed in the country of origin as well as exported and consumed elsewhere?

Line 223 The proportion of global ACE – proportion of what?  

Line 226 round to 2 or 3 significant digits

Lines 253 – 254, “in 2016, USA became a net exporter” this does not match what is shown in Figure 3, where the US has a net IMPORT quantity of nearly 60k of something (units not shown on the legend).   I wonder if you mean gross exports, to get at the amount exported before it is balanced with amounts imported.  (net meaning “remaining amount”, and gross meaning “total, sum, aggregate, whole, overall, or combined”; neither are well suited to describe quantities that cancel eachother out such as imports and exports).  This issue needs a much more thorough explanation for those of us who are not economists.

Line 190 emissions are in kg ACE per $ of production; it seems confusing to base emissions on the monetary value of agricultural production, when the value of $ varies over time.  But I’m not an economist so I’ll keep reading and see.

In table 3, the organization isn’t immediately clear; maybe divide the table into sections for imports and exports, and clarify if the countries listed in each are the top ___ exporters or importers….otherwise, why are there two separate lines for the US?

Is table 4 at the global level, for all of China, or something else? It is difficult to track changes over time here, with some positive and some negative; stacked line graphs showing the value of each quantity per decade, with changes being visually obvious, might make it easier to get quicker.

Line 481 ‘we find that the most important reason for China's shifting is 481 the improvement of China's agricultural green development level rather than the expan- 482 sion of import scale’  nowhere is there any discussion of HOW China’s ag green dev level has actually improved, e.g. what practices have reduced ACE in China’s agricultural products?

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful suggestions. We have made the appropriate changes and explained them accordingly.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 

I have read the article entitled “Impact analysis of globalization on China's agricultural carbon emissions”. The article is well detailed and the study title is average but interesting and is suitable to be published in Sustainability. But before publication I will suggest some minor corrections in the article. Following are the main points to be incorporated.

1. The title of the article seems not very clear. It will be better to revise the title.

2. The article has very less review of literature. Some suggested articles can help improve the study.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2022.106397

https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2022.868740

3. Study results need to be discussed properly.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I think the authors have sufficiently responded to my comments and the revised manuscript is suitable for publication.

 

Author Response

Thank you for reading our manuscript carefully.

Reviewer 2 Report

I do not find sufficient information in the paper to support its conclusion that China’s level of ‘green development’ has increased. The intro and other parts of the paper are lacking in sufficient scientific info to make this manuscript useful—I tried to look up and read referenced manuscripts to understand the paper.  Of the 3 references related to “green production”, 30 - 32, I could only actually find #30. Either the other 2 are very obscure journals or these references are incorrect or non-existent.  I was also unable to track any of this paper’s authors using ORCID, google scholar, or other means, to get a sense of their research focus and legitimacy.   

Further Comments:  

It is still not clear what is meant by “deepening” in abstract and elsewhere—maybe ‘intensifying’, ‘steepening’, ‘increasing’, or other? 

Lines 44 – 45 it is not useful in my opinion to compare monetary production at different time periods with reference to agricultural production or agricultural emissions, because inflation of dollar value has greatly increased over time, as have the ranges of embedded technological value in production (e.g. unprocessed alfalfa vs feed concentrates or GMO seed).  The actual types or agricultural products (e.g. dairy, palm oil, CAFO, corn, vs.biofuel crops), and overall agricultural productivity (e.g. yield of crop per unit area, extent of area in production) have also changed greatly over the study period.  Without any information on all these simultaneous changes, this is just an accounting exercise.

Lines 107 – 109 meaning not clear

Line 285 I think ‘main exporters’ should actually be ‘main importers’; you are talking about the recipients of China’s exported ACE, right?

Line 292 add “China’s imported ACE came [or] originated from Austraila, Myanmar….” To clarify the shift in discussing China’s exported ACE to China’s imported ACE.

Similarly, in Table 2—it is a bit confusing to have the right-most column titled “net EXported ACE” but the numbers are negative in years that China has more exports than imports.   I don’t necessarily need to see a change if this is the standard way of referring, but I wonder if this column should be net Imported ACE—the change from negative to positive marks the nation’s change from a net exporter to a net importer of ACE…

Table 3-1 and 3-2 maybe change to “major source nations of China’s imported ACE in 2016” to denote where emissions associated with China’s imports occurred, and “major recipient nations of China’s exported ACE in 2016” to denote countries getting products associated with emissions that occurred in China (or whichever is appropriate--It is still quite a difficult topic to convey easily…I am not sure which table goes with which flow).

Lines 323 to 356  … “indicates that the level of green development in China’s agriculture is rising rapidly.”   I do not think that this conclusion is justified from this analysis based entirely on economic and trade reports, especially given that there is no control for the value of a dollar unit over the study period.   “the rapid decline in embodied ACE per unit of exported product” must be based on something more easily compared over time to draw this conclusion.  This relates to the changes in embodied ACE per unit import and expor4t over time shown in Table 4—there are some very drastic changes in both directions; these relate to the nature of items traded and to their dollar value, and don’t indicate any change in actual agricultural sustainability of ‘green”ness.   Unless the term ‘green development’ is defined simply as value-added agricultural products, and not to mean anything related to decreases in emissions intensity, then I have to object to these statements.   I recognize that I am not an economist, and admit that I still do not understand Fig 4 or how green development level (a term never defined in the paper, just used in the abstract and the caption of table 4) .   the closest I can come to a definition is line 183, but that is a circular definition—saying that the embodied ACE per unit product characterizes agricultural green development level, without any justification. It may just mean that China is importing more raw materials and exporting more highly modified and/or expensive agricultural products.  That, and citing three papers (refs 30 – 32; reference 30 DOES go into actual environmental and social details such as pesticides, environmental quality, and farmer’s quality of life, while this paper is based solely on economic calculations.  References 31 and 32 do not exist online that I can find, so I cannot look at them.   There are, however, many other references of green development with similar titles, that DO explore actual environmental measurements.).       

Author Response

Thanks again for your helpful suggestions. We have made the appropriate changes and explained them accordingly.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf