Schoolchildren in China’s Protected Areas from a Sustainability Perspective: A Preliminary Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Accept in present from

Author Response

Answer: Thanks for the comments on the manuscript. We have now revised the manuscript to enhance our presentation of methods, findings, and conclusions. Please see the revised version for details.

Reviewer 2 Report

1) As a reviewer I would need access to supplementary data to better evaluate tis MS

2) Not clear from methods how the data for areas outside of protected areas were collected. Where is the comparison data from

3) Not clear of who actually filled the questionnaire on behalf of each school. How do we know it was not a bias.

4) Not clear why the questions were selected. 

5) The relationship to SDGs is rather subjective and incoherent

5) Presentation and organization could be improved. For example, index number if used should also be included in text describing the index

Generally well written. Some rearrangement of text may improve affectiveness of message delivery

Author Response

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1) As a reviewer I would need access to supplementary data to better evaluate tis MS

Answer: The reviewer may be able to download the supplementary materials from somewhere in the submission system.

2) Not clear from methods how the data for areas outside of protected areas were collected. Where is the comparison data from.

Answer: We collected data for areas outside of PAs from documents or yearbooks published by relevant ministries of China, such as Ministry of Education and National Bureau of Statistics. We now added in the manuscript the source of the data for those areas. Please see page 3, second paragraph.

3) Not clear of who actually filled the questionnaire on behalf of each school. How do we know it was not a bias.

Answer: The principal of each primary school filled the questionnaire on behalf of his or her school. We explained this in the “Materials and Methods” section, on page 3, first paragraph. It is reasonable to assume that, as principal of the school, he or she knows well about the conditions in the school. We also asked the principal to evaluate the conditions of schoolchildren at home. This is because principals are typically residents in PAs or have lived there for years and therefore are familiar with local livelihoods. Also, in the questionnaire, the principals select a specific range of values or select a qualitative description, instead of providing a specific quantitative value (See the questionnaire in Supplementary Material S1). This should have reduced the possibility of getting biased responses. In the “Concluding remarks” when we discussed the limitations of this study, we provided a footnote that also discusses these concerns. Please see page 10, footnote.

4) Not clear why the questions were selected.

Answer: Our purpose was to provide a portrayal of the conditions of schoolchildren in China’s PAs. Considering that schoolchildren spend most of their time in school and at home, we designed questions from those two aspects. In other words, we selected questions that could reflect children’s conditions in school or at home. Our questions were inspired by some published documents such as UNICEF’s annual report 2018 (UNICEF is United Nations Children’s Fund) and Children in China: An Atlas of Social Indicators 2018 which was prepared by China’s NWCCW, NBS, and UNICEF (see references 6 and 30). In these documents, important topics such as nutrition, education, sanitation, and safety are covered. We designed questions to reflect these topics. We also tailored our questions so that they look familiar and easy for the principals to answer. To improve the clarity of the selection of our questions, we now rewrote some parts of the first paragraph in “2. Materials and Methods”. Please see pages 2-3.

5) The relationship to SDGs is rather subjective and incoherent

Answer: As we noted in the manuscript, the SDGs are interlinked and integrated in nature, and quantifying the progress toward them has not been an easy task, largely due to the lack of adequate data. For instance, among the children-related SDGs indicators, about half of them have no available data (see, for example, https://data.unicef.org/sdgs/country/chn/ ). The data issue is worse for schoolchildren for whom a major part of indicators have no available data. Our purpose here was to provide an overview, from the sustainability perspective, of the conditions of schoolchildren by linking our indexes to SDGs. Constructing a network graph is a convenient way to do that. We explained in detail the linkages between our indexes and the nine SDGs that are closely related to our indexes. Specifically, we explained the significance of each SDG in indicating the disadvantage of schoolchildren, and we explained the importance of each index for the achievement of SDGs. Yes, the links between our indexes and SDGs are quite qualitative, as we noted in the “Concluding remarks” when we discussed the limitations of this study (page 10, second last paragraph). But these links do deliver some important information as we discussed in the manuscript. We now added some details to enhance this section. Please see page 8, first paragraph.

6) Presentation and organization could be improved. For example, index number if used should also be included in text describing the index

Answer: We made some revisions throughout the manuscript to improve the presentation. Please see the revised version of the manuscript. In “3.2 Conditions in school” and “3.3 Conditions at home” where we interpreted the results, we now added index numbers in the subheads of those interpretations so the reader can be able to refer to Table 1 conveniently when reading the text.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Generally well written. Some rearrangement of text may improve affectiveness of message delivery

Answer: We rewrote some sentences to make them clear and succinct. Please see the revised version of the manuscript.

Reviewer 3 Report

Thanks for inviting me to review this manuscript. This topic is interesting but the current manuscript has some major issues that have to be addressed. Please see my detailed comments below.

1.        I don’t get it. The title, as well as the abstract, the intro, and even the conclusion section, convey the message that this paper is about the life experience of children in protected areas. However, after reading the methods and the results section, I found that the paper merely describes the (mostly physical) condition of primary schools in PAs and some socio-demographics. This is absurd. Be honest with your audience, do not try to disguise your study with a seemingly fancy look.

2.        Please specify who your respondents are.

3.        I’m not sure if I get the right message. But I’ve never seen a questionnaire based study that has only 41 respondents. This sample size is good enough for a qualitative study but for a quantitative one, no. Even if it just describes the fact. I am almost 100% sure, the sample is severely biased. But again, I am open to this issue if you provide the information of your respondents and explain why they can answer these questions properly.

4.        The authors suggest that “schoolchildren in PAs are substantially disadvantaged”. I checked the list of PAs in your supplementary files. Most of them are rural areas in underdeveloped provinces in China. Children in those places are disadvantaged. It is common sense (see for example, Koo et al., 2014 about returning migrant students’ access to school; Li et al., 2015 about rural children’s opportunity to entre university; not to mention left-behind children who have received extensive academic attention already, not something that you have to write a paper to figure out. What this paper might provide, is how children in PAs may differ from those normal left behind children and what that means to the rural area.

5.        It is unclear where your indicators come from. It seems to me they come from nowhere. This is not acceptable. Explain in detail why you chose these to understand how children in PAs are socially disadvantaged (and you have to provide enough reference for preferably EACH indicator you used).

6.        The connection between this paper and the SDGs is extremely weak. The easiest way to improve this is to clarify what actual problems your indicators may reflect and discuss the link between that specific problem and its corresponding SDG. A very minor one, in Figure 2, uses SDG1,2,3… instead of G1,2,3…

7.        Children in different cultural environments may receive very different education. For example, residents in rural settlements where gemeinschaft identity is strong may have a stronger sense of attachment to their land (Liu et al., 2023), and in your case, to the protected areas. So nature conservation and other sustainability education may be more effective for them. That could be a good way to improve the sustainability in PAs I assume. Please discuss this in your discussion section.

Reference

Koo, A., Ming, H., & Tsang, B. (2014). The doubly disadvantaged: How return migrant students fail to access and deploy capitals for academic success in rural schools. Sociology, 48(4), 795-811.

Li, H., Loyalka, P., Rozelle, S., Wu, B., & Xie, J. (2015). Unequal access to college in China: How far have poor, rural students been left behind?. The China Quarterly, 221, 185-207.

Liu, Q., Liu, Z., Yu, Z., & Zhao, P. (2023). The living environment and intravillage activity-travel: A conceptual framework based on participant observation in Guangdong, China. Journal of Rural Studies, 99, 121-133.

 

 

readable but can be improved

Author Response

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks for inviting me to review this manuscript. This topic is interesting but the current manuscript has some major issues that have to be addressed. Please see my detailed comments below.

1. I don’t get it. The title, as well as the abstract, the intro, and even the conclusion section, convey the message that this paper is about the life experience of children in protected areas. However, after reading the methods and the results section, I found that the paper merely describes the (mostly physical) condition of primary schools in PAs and some socio-demographics. This is absurd. Be honest with your audience, do not try to disguise your study with a seemingly fancy look.

Answer: We greatly appreciate this comment, it enhances our belief that being honest in research is key to great discoveries. We now replaced “children” in the title with “schoolchildren”. We hope this change helps to make the title more specific and clear. In the abstract and the introduction, we first set out the background of the study, namely, the importance of children in PAs for a sustainable future, then we stated that we will be focusing on schoolchildren. In “Concluding remarks” (page 10, third paragraph), we replaced children with schoolchildren to make the conclusion more specific and consistent with the title.

2. Please specify who your respondents are.

Answer: The respondents are the principals of primary schools. We stated this in “Materials and Methods”. Please see page 3, first paragraph. These principals can be counted on because they are familiar with the conditions in their school, and they know well about the living conditions in their protected area too, because they are residents there or have worked there for years. In the “Concluding remarks” when we discussed the limitations of this study, we had a footnote to explain this (page 10, second last paragraph and footnote).

3. I’m not sure if I get the right message. But I’ve never seen a questionnaire based study that has only 41 respondents. This sample size is good enough for a qualitative study but for a quantitative one, no. Even if it just describes the fact. I am almost 100% sure, the sample is severely biased. But again, I am open to this issue if you provide the information of your respondents and explain why they can answer these questions properly.

Answer: First, we were inferring the conditions in the population (all PAs in China, which is >11.8 thousand, a large population) using a sample of 41 nature reserves (which is a small sample). Our goal was to estimate the 95% confidence interval for each index in the population. The exact binomial test in the software package R can do this. While some other methods do require a large sample, such as Wilson or Asymptotic that are normal-distribution based, the exact binomial test does not. A sample size of 41 is large enough to do an exact binomial test. And second, if we look at the distribution of those 41 nature reserves (schools), we see that they disperse across mainland China and that they are not severely clustered. So we may reasonably assume that this sample is a fairly good representative of the population. We acknowledged that a larger sample size would deliver more accurate results. We noted in the “Concluding remarks”. Please see page 10, second last paragraph.

4. The authors suggest that “schoolchildren in PAs are substantially disadvantaged”. I checked the list of PAs in your supplementary files. Most of them are rural areas in underdeveloped provinces in China. Children in those places are disadvantaged. It is common sense (see for example, Koo et al., 2014 about returning migrant students’ access to school; Li et al., 2015 about rural children’s opportunity to entre university; not to mention left-behind children who have received extensive academic attention already, not something that you have to write a paper to figure out. What this paper might provide, is how children in PAs may differ from those normal left behind children and what that means to the rural area.

Answer: Thanks for noting us with these references, we were not aware of them (most likely because we have been focusing exclusively on children in PAs). We agree (and indeed, it is common sense) that children in rural areas in underdeveloped areas in China are disadvantaged. However, this manuscript contributes by showing that children in PAs are even more disadvantaged than those in rural areas (see Figure 1). This must mean something for the planning and management of PAs, as we discussed in “4. Possible reasons” and “6. Policy implications”. Specifically, we suggested that the negative impacts of conservation programs may have channeled down to affect children’s conditions in PAs (see page 7, second last paragraph) and that cooperation across governments and non-governments organizations is needed for a strategic plan to mitigate inequality and improve children’s wellbeing (see pages 9-10, policy implications). Another contribution of this manuscript is that it provides some specific information on the schoolchildren in China’s PAs regarding their conditions in school and at home (beyond the general conception that “Children in rural areas are disadvantaged”). In other words, this manuscript presents quantitative data for schoolchildren’s conditions using the 22 indexes in this study. These results may be considered preliminary, but they might be helpful in soliciting more research on children in PAs. To enhance our discussion section, we now cited the two references (Koo et al., 2014 and Li et al., 2015) mentioned here by the reviewer in “Concluding remarks”. Please see page 10, third paragraph.

5. It is unclear where your indicators come from. It seems to me they come from nowhere. This is not acceptable. Explain in detail why you chose these to understand how children in PAs are socially disadvantaged (and you have to provide enough reference for preferably EACH indicator you used).

Answer: This comment is essentially the same as point 4 by reviewer 2. For completeness reasons, we provide our answer again here. Our purpose was to provide a portrayal of the conditions of schoolchildren in China’s PAs. Considering that schoolchildren spend most of their time in school and at home, we designed questions from those two aspects. In other words, we selected questions that could reflect children’s conditions in school or at home. Our questions were inspired by some published documents such as UNICEF’s annual report 2018 (UNICEF is United Nations Children’s Fund) and Children in China: An Atlas of Social Indicators 2018 which was prepared by China’s NWCCW, NBS, and UNICEF (see references 6 and 30). In these documents, important topics such as nutrition, education, sanitation, and safety are covered. We designed questions to reflect these topics. We also tailored our questions so that they look familiar and easy for the principals to answer. To improve the clarity of the selection of our questions, we now rewrote some parts of the first paragraph in “2. Materials and Methods”. Please see pages 2-3.

6. The connection between this paper and the SDGs is extremely weak. The easiest way to improve this is to clarify what actual problems your indicators may reflect and discuss the link between that specific problem and its corresponding SDG. A very minor one, in Figure 2, uses SDG1,2,3… instead of G1,2,3…

Answer: The lack of adequate data has been a common issue in assessing the progress toward the SDGs. This can be seen, for example, from https://data.unicef.org/sdgs/country/chn/. The data issue is worse for schoolchildren for whom a major part of indicators in the SDGs indicator framework have no available data. Our purpose here was to provide an overview, from the sustainability perspective, of the conditions of schoolchildren by linking our indexes to SDGs. Constructing a network graph is a convenient way to do so. We provided a detailed interpretation of the graph. Specifically, we explained the significance of each SDG in indicating the disadvantage of schoolchildren, and we explained the importance of each index for the achievement of SDGs. Those links in Figure 2 do deliver some important information as we discussed in the manuscript. We thank the reviewer for the suggestion on the method to improve the connection between our indexes and the SDGs. We now added an example to explain the link between the problem reflected by our indicator and the corresponding SDG. Please see page 8, first paragraph. We now also replaced G1, 2, 3… in Figure 2 with SDG1, 2, 3…, respectively. We also made the replacement in the text.

7. Children in different cultural environments may receive very different education. For example, residents in rural settlements where gemeinschaft identity is strong may have a stronger sense of attachment to their land (Liu et al., 2023), and in your case, to the protected areas. So nature conservation and other sustainability education may be more effective for them. That could be a good way to improve the sustainability in PAs I assume. Please discuss this in your discussion section.

Answer: We agree, and we appreciate this comment. A modified version of this comment is now added in the “Policy implications” section, and we cited Liu et al., 2013. Please see page 10, first paragraph.

Reference:

Koo, A., Ming, H., & Tsang, B. (2014). The doubly disadvantaged: How return migrant students fail to access and deploy capitals for academic success in rural schools. Sociology, 48(4), 795-811.

Li, H., Loyalka, P., Rozelle, S., Wu, B., & Xie, J. (2015). Unequal access to college in China: How far have poor, rural students been left behind?. The China Quarterly, 221, 185-207.

Liu, Q., Liu, Z., Yu, Z., & Zhao, P. (2023). The living environment and intravillage activity-travel: A conceptual framework based on participant observation in Guangdong, China. Journal of Rural Studies, 99, 121-133.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

readable but can be improved

Answer: We rewrote some sentences to make them clear and succinct. Please see the revised version of the manuscript.

Reviewer 4 Report

This article explores the very interesting and important topic of protected areas from a sustainability perspective. The authors focus on protected areas for children.

In the introductory part of the article, the authors give a detailed justification for the chosen logic of research and presentation of the material. The article has an important scientific value, the text is presented in a logical and structured way. 

The study conducted is described in detail. The authors provide the original data in an appendix to the article.

I think that a good addition would still be the hypothesis in the introduction and its confirmation at the end of the article.

Authors can do a bit of work to modify the word order.

Author Response

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article explores the very interesting and important topic of protected areas from a sustainability perspective. The authors focus on protected areas for children.

In the introductory part of the article, the authors give a detailed justification for the chosen logic of research and presentation of the material. The article has an important scientific value, the text is presented in a logical and structured way.

The study conducted is described in detail. The authors provide the original data in an appendix to the article.

I think that a good addition would still be the hypothesis in the introduction and its confirmation at the end of the article.

Answer: Yes, we did this in “Introduction” where we stated that “In this article, our goal is to provide a portrayal of the conditions of schoolchildren in school and at home and link those conditions to SDGs” (page 2, second last paragraph), and then in “Concluding remarks”, we concluded that “We found that schoolchildren in China’s PAs are substantially disadvantaged in terms of many aspects both in school and at home. Those children’s conditions may indicate the inadequacy of China’s PAs in meeting the SDGS discussed in this study.” (page 10, third paragraph).

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Authors can do a bit of work to modify the word order.

Answer: We rewrote some sentences to make them clear and succinct. Please see the revised version of the manuscript.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I'm satisfied with the revision. Thanks for sharing.