Supporting Cities towards Carbon Neutral Transition through Territorial Acupuncture

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for submitting your research to Sustainability Journal and thank you for your effort for this manuscript. Please take  my comments into consideration to improve your manuscript' quality. 

Abstract

1. Line 12: "to counter the now dysfunctional dynamics". Please explain  "the now". Is this a typo or a new concept? I never heard this term before.

2. Line 14: Instead of referring concepts such as "this", please write the full name of concepts. Readers may not understand what does "this" refer to?

3. "Territorial acupuncture" should be explain in more detail in the abstract section. 

Introduction

1. Line 32: "with the emergence of new epidemics/pandemics, with food..." there is no need to "with" again. 

2. Line 35: Please firstly give the full name of the organisations. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).....

3. Reference 7 is Finnish.  Have you got an "English" reference instead of ref.7? 

4. The authors prefer to give reference together at the end of the paragraphs. There are, for instance, 20 references for the organisations  [7–27]. Which reference is for which topic? It is hard to understand and check the references for the readers. Could you please change the way of giving reference?

5. The reference 47 is from 2017. The paper predicts the population of the Europe. The sentence of "Already highly urbanised territories with almost no population growth, such as Europe" should be referred to a  report with a current date. Predictions have got limitations.

6. Why do the authors use one sentence for one paragraph in introduction?

7. Line 44: "dot" should be coming after the references.

8. Line 70: "the gap" which gap? Between what? I understood that the authors refer there is no study on this subject...... however, this is not a gap. please change the way of sentence construction.

Materials and Methods 

Methods should be written in detail and logical pathways. Current manuscript does not tell the methods in clear way. how do you analyse the limits, how do you formalize methodology? What is methodology of the paper? For instance, between Lines 355-361 is book information, it is not a method. I consider that results and methods are intermixed into each other. 

Results

Figure 4 should be re-shaped for the left rectangle.  Issuess?

Line 501: "Another In developing this methodology"??

Territorial acupuncture should be explained in more detail. The manuscript ,itself now, does not explain the concept well. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Editor,

I have completed reviewing this article (sustainability-2201690) which needs minor revision.

Title: Supporting cities towards carbon neutral transition through Territorial acupuncture

Suggestion: Minor revision

This article carried out a phased study to present new concept and its operation in the transition to carbon neutrality in already highly populated territories and to counter the now dysfunctional dynamics between large urban centres and small towns. The findings suggest that it’s necessary to carry out multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary analyses over the entire territory to identify the intervention 20 points, and then proceed to the design and interconnection of the individual district. It is a very meaningful paper which gives the public some guidances when starting to make some policies on supporting cities towards carbon neutral transition through territorial acupuncture. It is well-organized and designed. My overall feeling towards this manuscript is positive. Analysis is also appropriate and seems properly implemented. However, there are some major issues that need to be addressed.

1. Abstract. What is the limitation of the existing studies? The authors need to explore the originality and contribution of the study in this section. 

2. The authors should provide a paragraph at the Introduction section to present the article organization.

3. The literature section. How the existing studies related to your methods? These issues should be stated clearly in this section.

4. The limitations or future research directions should be presented in a new subsection.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you very much for your improvements on the revised manuscript. The manuscript is now acceptable for the readers. Thank you again for your effort on my corrections and best luck for your future studies.

Sincerely yours.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your kind words. We are very glad that you appreciated our efforts to improve the paper. Thank you very much for the comments you left during the review process. They enabled us to improve the quality of our study. Thank you again.

Sincerely yours.