Inventory of Water–Energy–Waste Resources in Rural Houses in Gran Canaria Island: Application and Potential of Renewable Resources and Mitigation of Carbon Footprint and GHG

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is a complex and reliable study on inventory of water-energy-waste resources in rural houses in 2 Gran Canaria Island (GCI) with adopting carbon and ecological footprint methodologies. The topic is of high importance nowadays and combines the development of rural tourism issue and its reference to environmental impacts. Despite the overall scientific soundness of the study I have some remarks to the paper:

Title: authors refer to " Application of renewable resources" in the second part of the title but should refer also “potential” to it, since it is their estimate. Additionally, the aim of the paper is defined as “to define a tool for calculating EF to improve the decision for the 183 application of RES-E in rural environments, to inventory the available water, waste and 184 removable resources in Gran Canaria and their applicability and leave for a second article 185 the development and application of economic profitability” (r. 183-186) but some of its parts has no visible coverage within the title. No tool definition intention is included there. Therefore, I propose to redefine the title or the aim of the paper.

Introduction: this section provides good overview of rural tourism and GCI as a perfect destination for it as well as its related consequences. I have no specific remarks here.

Materials and Methods: Perhaps justification of methods used (CF and EF) should be more exposed here.

Results and Discussion: The results are presented in a structured manner and have appropriate illustrations but are missing some synthesis at the end. By synthesis I mean the comparison of possible development within all the areas considered here. As for the discussion, we don’t have it here actually. The discussion should be referred to some external sources that are covering similar topics, areas or methods. But there is no such an approach here. My advice is to bring out some results or assumptions from other authors here and comment them with your own results.

Conclusion: Some of the issues that are raised here does not have the coverage within the results presented earlier in the text.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Above all, thanks for your time and consideration with the paper revision. The modifications made following the given recommendations are shown below.  

 

1. Title: authors refer to " Application of renewable resources" in the second part of the title but should refer also “potential” to it, since it is their estimate. Additionally, the aim of the paper is defined as “to define a tool for calculating EF to improve the decision for the 183 application of RES-E in rural environments, to inventory the available water, waste and 184 removable resources in Gran Canaria and their applicability and leave for a second article 185 the development and application of economic profitability” (r. 183-186) but some of its parts has no visible coverage within the title. No tool definition intention is included there. Therefore, I propose to redefine the title or the aim of the paper

 

Response:

The title has been changed to the following: “Inventory of water-energy-waste resources in ru-ral houses in Gran Canaria Island: Application and potential of renewable resources and miti-gation of carbon footprint and GHG” following the recommendations given.

We have also considered modifying the wording of the objective. In this way we consider that it is better exposed.

“The aim of this paper is to define a methodology to inventory in tourism rural environments the available water, waste and removable resources and their carbon footprint for the application of RES-E”.

2. Materials and Methods: Perhaps justification of methods used (CF and EF) should be more exposed here.

 

Response:

Information has been added to better justify the exposed methods since line 236 to 259.

3. Results and Discussion: The results are presented in a structured manner and have appropriate illustrations but are missing some synthesis at the end. By synthesis I mean the comparison of possible development within all the areas considered here. As for the discussion, we don’t have it here actually. The discussion should be referred to some external sources that are covering similar topics, areas or methods. But there is no such an approach here. My advice is to bring out some results or assumptions from other authors here and comment them with your own results.

 

Response: To improve and follow the recommendations given, the results obtained have been presented more concisely. Likewise, the discussion section has been developed comparing our results with those of other authors.

CF of rural tourism represent approximately 15 tCO₂-_eq per year, considering the consumption of DWH, electricity consumption and the generation of waste and wastewater and an EF of approximately 7.5 ha year^-1. Furthermore, has been observed that the generation of biogas would only cover 9% of the total energy demand.

 

Our results are in line with those obtained by Fortuny et al. [12] where a complete evaluation of the transformation towards sustainable tourism is presented, since in both studies a methodology is presented for the reduction of environmental impacts associated with tour-ism development in the island territories, focusing especially on areas such as energy consumption, water and waste management. According to our study, it is proposed to use more environmentally sustainable technological alternatives than the current ones that take advantage of available local energy resources. In addition, the application of internal management tools to minimize the resources consumed and the generation of waste. As also mentioned above, the economic feasibility of implementing the selected renewable technologies should also be studied.

The results obtained by Sun et al. [54] where the relationship between the contribution of tourism in the economy and its impact on emissions is manifested, are consistent with those obtained in this study. Taking as reference indicators similar to those used to carry out this analysis, such as gross domestic product, water consumption and waste generation for the calculation of the carbon footprint. Unlike our study, they also consider the GHG emissions produced by tourists outside the accommodation itself (arrivals and departures, meals in restaurants, trips, ...). Therefore, it would be of interest in the future to make a similar comparison with the insularity conditions given in the present study.

Like our case study, the paper developed by Sun [55] indicates the impact that rural tourism can have on an island territory, pointing out that this type of activity is generally found in an isolated area, with a small scale of industrialization, natural resources limited and a relatively small population. In this article they address the importance of the energy de-pendency that exists in this type of territory, for which it is proposed to reduce said de-pendency and therefore reduce the carbon footprint of both tourists and energy imports, re-sorting to more ecological alternatives for balance tourism. carbon development and mitigation such as the insertion of renewable energy sources.

In the paper by Díaz et al. [39] a comparison is made between the carbon footprint of the hotels in the Canary Islands with respect to mainland Spain, although their results applied to mass tourism located in hotels coincide with ours, showing that the consumption of water and waste is greater in the archipelago than in the peninsula, as well as the GHG emission factor. Therefore, his proposal, similar to the one developed in this work, tries to reduce the carbon footprint to practically zero.

 

4. Conclusion: Some of the issues that are raised here does not have the coverage within the results presented earlier in the text.

 

Response:

By modifying the Results and discussions section, the conclusions set forth have been better expressed.

 

 

 

 

About PDF reviews.

• In case of such a direct reference I propose to refer to them as "sources" or "publications" instead of only numbers. if it is single publication, please refer to author instead.

 

Response: All citations have been revised and corrected.

 

• The title of this section is "Water and wastewater..." so this paragraph does not fit into here. Give it a title or comment with reference to wastewater.

 

Response: A section has been created for the generation of waste on Introduction section.

“Waste production overview.

As for the generation of waste in Gran Canaria according to the Study of composition and characterization of municipal solid waste of the Canary Islands [17] 532507 t are produced annually, that is, approximately an annual per capita generation of 615 kg where .The organic fraction represents approximately 40% of the total waste generation. With respect to the solid fraction, waste generation in the predominantly rural Autonomous Communities does not differ significantly from that of the predominantly urban Communities, however Canary Islands show a higher rate of waste generation mainly due to the im-pact of the tourist factor [18].”.

 

• Switched symbols.

Response:  have been successfully modified

 

 

• I'm not sure if this is the intention - please check.

Response: the expression has been modified to achieve a better understanding of what is intended to convey:

“With this, it has been achieved that to fully cover the energy demand from renewable ener-gies and reduce the carbon footprint significantly of the rural houses with more than four places, an available area of more than 30 m² is needed”

 

• I'm not sure whether this conclusion is related to the results of the research made.

 

Response. By modifying the Results and discussions section, the conclusions set forth have been better expressed.

“According to the results, we must work in the direction of reducing the carbon footprint generated by rural tourism”.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1. Please correct editing errors, e.g. tCO_2-eq, pools, …) (L. 163), unnecessary spaces, the lack of full stop, L. 200, font type, line spaces, CO2, kgCO2, kWh-1, L d-1, m-3, kg-1, oC, km2, m3, etc.
2. Please introduce every abbreviation and acronym before using it in the text (put them in parentheses after the full terms),
3. Please add the information about EF in the introduction section.
4. Please add references to the all equations used.
5. Please add statistical analysis and describe the statistics used in the Materials and Methods section.
6. Please move the equation (15) to the Materials and Methods section.
7. Text - lines 514-518 is redundant.

Author Response

Thank you for the work of reviewing the document and making modification recommendations to improve it and obtain a better result.

 

1. Please correct editing errors, e.g. tCO2-eq, pools, …) (L. 163), unnecessary spaces, the lack of full stop, L. 200, font type, line spaces, CO2, kgCO2, kWh-1, L d-1, m-3, kg-1, oC, km2, m3, etc.
2. Please introduce every abbreviation and acronym before using it in the text (put them in parentheses after the full terms)

 

Response. The entire document has been revised with the intention of correcting the errors mentioned in points 1 and 2.

 

3. Please add the information about EF in the introduction section.

 

Response. Has been added information about the EF in the Introduction section:

“Carbon and Ecological Footprint (Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) from electricity production overview.

It is possible to call the carbon footprint as the totality of greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted by direct or indirect effect of an individual, organization, event or product where greenhouse gas emissions are expressed in kg equivalent of CO2. It is also interesting to use the concept of ecological footprint, since it can give a better notion of the situation, since it indicates the surface of the natural environment necessary to produce the resources that a human population consumes and absorb the waste that it generates, it is measured in hectares per year [21–23]”

 

4. Please add references to all equations used.

Response. References have been added to all equations cited in the document

 

5. Please add statistical analysis and describe the statistics used in the Materials and Methods section.

 

Response. Has been added the statistical tools used to process the data and obtain the results.

 

“Statistical analysis

To carry out the proposed calculations taking into account the starting data, different statistical tools have been used. These statistical tools or methods are set out below.

• Interval data. For a better treatment of the data, it has been decided to group them by intervals, the calculations made have been obtained as a result of the grouping by number of beds in the rural houses. In addition, the rural houses have been classified according to the altitude at which they were located, creating intervals from 400 meters to 1,500 meters.

 

• Arithmetic Average, maximum, minimum and standard deviation. arithmetic mean is the most widely used measure of a mean, or average, in our case study, it has been used to define the average values of beds per rural house, average altitude of the location of the rural houses studied, average consumption of water, DHW, electricity and waste production. It has also been used to calculate the average solar radiation as well as the available wind potential according to altitude. In addition, have been calculated the maximum and minimum values and the standard deviation of the EqH of operation of the solar photovoltaic and wind installations.

 

• Relative Frequency. When making the calculations based on the grouping by number of places offered by accommodation, the relative frequency with which each grouping is obtained has been calculated, generating an idea of which are the most representative groups of the total sample.”.

 

 

 

6. Please move the equation (15) to the Materials and Methods section.

 

Response: This has been realized, equation (15) has been moved to line 278 and now is equation (14).

 

7. Text - lines 514-518 is redundant.

 

Response.  This has been eliminated

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx