Adapting Water Resources Management to Climate Change in Water-Stressed River Basins—Júcar River Basin Case
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe article is interesting and raises important issues related to water management. I consider the article to bring new content in the context of the topic under discussion. I recommend the article for publication after taking into account the following comments.
1. The Results and Discussion sections should be separated for better reading.
2. ….Natural renewable resource or total contribution obtained with the PATRICAL model [31] for the period 1980/81-2017/18…. The current year is 2024, so the last five years are missing.
3. The authors' proposed measures to adapt to climate change include: increase reclaimed water use, increase seawater desalination use, improvement in the irrigation systems efficiency and basins interconnection.
These are valid assumptions, but, unfortunately, I do not find costs and, more specifically, detailed calculations of such investments and the economic justification for their continued operation. Thus, if such activities are unprofitable then it is unwarranted to analyze them and discuss them in relation to this topic.
4. Chapter Conclusions should be rewritten. It currently does not focus on the main achievements of the research.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Many thanks to help us to improve the manuscript.
We attach the response to the reviewer
Best Regards
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe strengths of the paper are the detailed comparison of the water scarcity indices and the assessment of the measures proposed by the governmental plans in a case study of great interest (the Jucar river basin district).
1.However the paper presents some weaknesses: i) the impacts of a multi-years drought seems not considered, ii) the choice of the different measures to increase the water resources (seawater desalination, treated wastewaters) is lacking of an assessment of the costs, iii) the strategic storage of runoff in a multi-years regulation reservoir, in order to mitigate the impacts of a severe drought, is not cited as effective measure. It is required to improve the text eliminating these weaknesses.
2.The presentation of the Water Stress and Water Scarcity Indices in the Introduction requires to be better organized. In particular it is not opportune to indicate 0,4 as extreme threshold (line 54), when the definitions of the demand and the resources are not yet given.
3. The proposal of adjusting the thresholds of some scarcity indices in order to capture the behaviour of some basins should be supported by an explanation of the methods adopted to assess the real behaviour of the investigated basins.
4. It is suggested to clarify if the interconnection between basins refers to a permanent water transfer from a basin with a surplus of resources to a basin with water shortage or if it includes only the water transfer during the drought periods. In this case it could be necessary to evaluate that the drought periods in the two basins do not occur generally at the same time
Minor comments.
-Check in table 2 the value of ANWR for JRBD: 3,362.9 does not fit with the sums computed ( 3,814.3 and 3,371.9).
-Line 138: add the rain characteristics of the winter
-line 142: check the statement, as the capacity of reservoirs is likely planned in order to allow a multi-yeas regulation (not only one year)
-line 155: it is opportune to provide some more details on the methodology adopted to assess the decrease of precipitation and water resources in the papers 27,28 and 29 to let the reader understand whether these methods are identical or not to those applied later in the paragraph 2.2.
-line 464: cancel the mark between “Recuperacion” and “Transformacion” and between “Resiliencia” and”Founded”.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Many thanks to help us to improve the manuscript.
We attach the comments to the reviewer
Best Regards
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
