Toward Climate-Neutral Heavy Industry: An Analysis of Industry Transition Roadmaps

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript is well planned and developed, and the subject is relevant. The research topic is clearly presented and justified, providing interesting insights in the area, especially from the practical side.

I would recommend it for publication, with the consideration of following suggestions for improvement:

• Line 92, remove the ‘.’ after ‘1987’.
• Line 334, reformulate sentence to avoid repetition of ‘regard..’
• Line 436, this section should be ‘4.3’.
• Sections 4 and 5 : I would suggest to further link or contrast the contents with existing literature.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thank you for your very helpful comments. We have addressed them as follows:

• Line 92, remove the ‘.’ after ‘1987’: Done
• Line 334, reformulate sentence to avoid repetition of ‘regard..’: Edited to avoid repetition
• Line 436, this section should be ‘4.3’.: Noted and changed
• Sections 4 and 5 : I would suggest to further link or contrast the contents with existing literature.: We have added additional text in a number of places within the Discussion section (Section 4) to better link our findings to existing literature.
  

Kind regards.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article has its value, but I am not very sure if this journal is the best to use the dissemination of the ideas developed. The paper is addressed on my opinion mostly to stakeholders and policy-makers. Make them came close to these ideas and it would be great.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your helpful comment on our manuscript. Your comment flagged the relevance of publishing this work in Applied Sciences journal.

We have chosen to publish this work in Applied Sciences because we believe our analysis is very relevant to the academic community in empirical and methodological terms. We critically evaluate the methods we used to analyze and compare industry roadmaps, showing there can be considerable value in analyzing across countries to see broad trends, but also significant limitations due to lack of standardized roadmap approaches. Our analysis also explored how conceptual understandings of industry transition, based on socio-technical transitions approaches, are reflected in the empirical world of policy and planning. We believe this research is particularly valuable to scholars looking at the role of international collaboration in bringing about industry decarbonization. Meanwhile, the Industry Transition Tracker at www.industrytransition.org offers a valuable channel for disseminating this analysis to policymakers and stakeholders.

Kind regards,