Can Agricultural Productive Services Inhibit Carbon Emissions? Evidence from China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study investigates how agricultural productive services (APS) can impact agricultural carbon emissions (ACE), concludes that there is an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between the APS and ACE, and determines the inflection point value of ACE. Some minor comments as follows:

Q1 Hypothesis 3 should be given an appropriate explanation of why this assumption exists.

Q2 In the discussion section, it is recommended to supplement the contribution and guidance of the core findings of this study to China's ACE reduction, and the last paragraph of the conclusion is recommended to be placed in the discussion.

Q3 In section 4.1, the kernel density curve in 2020 shows a different trend than in 2010 and 2015. It is recommended to add the reasons for this result.

Q4 In Figure 3, ACE in different years use different criteria for natural interruption point to be divided into 4 categories，which makes it difficult to compare between years. It is recommended that the authors unify the grading criteria. Or replace graded analysis by analyzing absolute quantity variations and regional differences.

Q5 Regarding the threshold effect of cultivated land operation scale, all the areas below the threshold are municipalities. The urbanization and modernization level of municipalities are definitely higher than those of the provincial scale, resulting in a lower scale of cultivated land operation. Is it reasonable to treat municipalities and provinces as a sample of the same type to analyze the threshold for the scale of cultivated land operations?

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Dear Reviewer,

 

Thank you very much for your careful review of the manuscript. In addition, your questions and suggestions for the manuscript are of great help to the improvement of our article quality and future research. In response to your five suggestions, we have given deep consideration to them and explained them in detail in our responses.

We appreciate for your valuable comments sincerely and hope our modifications can resolve your concerns.

 

Best regards,

Ziming Bai

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is extremely interesting both because of the content of the paper and the research methodology. The issue of GHG emissions in agriculture is becoming crucial and any methods of reducing them are important.
1. What is "utmost" line 8
2. It is important to explain what APS is, early in the introduction. You write a lot about it and explain the concept on page 3
3 Please highlight how APS was calculated. The information is in the article, but is  hidden.
4. Table 1 - refers to kg/ hm2 of each production? This is a very strongly averaged indicator, I have some doubts whether it is useful for calculations.
5. Similarly regarding the impact of APs on APCs in neighbouring regions. At this level of generalisation (whole provinces) these effects seem questionable.
6. It would be interesting to see in a table (graph) the amount of APC by region of the country or per hm2 of agricultural land.  
7. line 540 - "mu" - I checked, it is about a unit of area but you use hm2 before. Please standardise.
8. line 562-575 I fully agree with the authors. The data is at a very high level of aggregation, there is a need for a more thorough approach to the problem both due to spatial variation and emission factors.
Overall an article of a very high methodological and substantive level, however, there are some concerns with the use of data at a high level of generality.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your careful review. You have reviewed the article very carefully and raised many regulation and detail issues. Your valuable suggestions are important to improve our manuscript. In addition, we would like to thank you for your positive comments of the manuscript, which encouraged us deeply. We have revised the manuscript and made a detailed explanation in our responses.

We hope our modifications can resolve your concerns. Thanks again for your valuable comments and suggestions.

 

Best regards,

Ziming Bai

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors needs to take consideration the following prior paublication

 

- research hypothesis should be more clear

- where the results are directly usefull and applicable and for what purposed 

- state of the art needs to expand

- avoid general statements e.g "Currently, numerous studies have been conducted on ACE and APS ..L 54" which are these studies, what they mentioned etc 

- clarified which is the gap in the scientific community and what exactly are you solving 

- several section lacks citations e.g L122-135, L136-151 etc

- what is the relation with the proposed SDGs

 

English need to be check  

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your valuable comments, which helps us improve our article a lot. We have revised the manuscript and made a detailed explanation in our responses. In addition, we also fixed some language problems. We hope our modifications can resolve your concerns.

Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.

 

Best regards,

Ziming Bai

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf