Do Digital Climate Services for Farmers Encourage Resilient Farming Practices? Pinpointing Gaps through the Responsible Research and Innovation Framework

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is a good piece on the usefullness of innovations in terms of climate services through digital apps by various groups. The background is well-established and contextualized. The language and presentation have merits and quality. The method is well-discussed and suits aptly to the study. The selection of apps is little subjective while giving no justification/explanation if all the apps selected are genuine and/or how was ensured the listing/covering of maximum apps. The possible shortcoming may be the lack of user-related feedback and how this aspect has been tackled by the authors, may at least, be/can be documented. The selection of sites/study locations also needs to be justified or at least a background for not covering other countries in the region be included. there is also some redundancy/repetition in the paper which also needs to be tackled.

Minor:

-What does 'nine' mean in abstract? 

 

-(e)-literacy stands for what?

The heading 1.2 needs revisit...it can be 'Who Demands Digital Agri...' or some other one.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for these comments, which we have taken on board. 

Specifically, the concerns about the process for selecting apps is now addressed in more detail in the entire methods section, and particularly the Caveats L286-206. Here, we also discuss the fact that it is impossible to know the total extent of apps, which then leads to our recommendation for protocols to enable systematic app comparisons (where we have updated L801-806, L895-919). 

We appreciate the comment on lack of farmer views and opinions. Although we have stressed this throughout the discussion, their absence in this particular study is acknowledged on L720. 

We have reworked the entire introduction, and we hope that the reasons for Southeast Asia now appear more upfront when contrasted against Africa (sections 1.1.3 and 1.1.4). Apps from all countries in Southeast Asia could  not be included as we either did not find any (in English) or the documentation was poor. 

For the editorial issues, we have corrected these and other errors. 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

About the submission with the title "Do digital climate services for farmers discourage resilient farming practices? Pinpointing gaps through the Responsible Research and Innovation framework" I have the following comments:

 

The paper is about an interesting topic, however it is a little hard to follow.

 

I suggest the authors highlight in the abstract/introduction the main gaps that justify this study and its novelty.

 

It is important that the authors explain the background considered to organise the paper in the several sections and subsections. In other words, how and why the authors defined and identified the several sections/subsections. For example, in the introduction were defined 3 subsections. Why these and not others? The same in the other sections.

 

In section 2, why these approaches and not others? A benchmark is missing. In addition, the methodologies used to obtain the results in section 3 seem strongly subject, what may bias the conclusions. How the authors dealt with these weaknesse. Maybe something more robust (machine/deep learning, qualitative methodologies) could be more appropriate.

 

A conclusions section is missing.

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for these comments.

We have tried to address them all and we believe they have helped improving the structure and clarity of the manuscript.   

In the light of your comments, we have revised the abstract, rewritten parts but primarily reorganised the entire introduction section. In doing so we believe that both the gaps entering the study and the layers of gaps we identify and discuss after using the RRI framework should link better to the Discussion.   

In addition to modifying the headings in the introduction, we have added a guide to the reader at the start of the discussion. 

We appreciate the comments regarding the methodology. The entire section has been revised to address the reviewer's concerns about the selection and analysis of apps and possible bias. Furthermore, in the Caveats L286-206 we discuss the fact that it is impossible to know the total extent of apps, which leads to our recommendation for protocols to enable systematic app comparisons. While we agree that machine learning could be an interesting and effective approach to capture more apps for a review, a major challenge here is the missing and nonsystematic information. Nevertheless, we appreciate this suggestion and would be interested to take this on in future research (see we have updated L801-806, L895-919).  

We are not sure what the reviewer refers to with 'benchmark' and have not addressed this comment.   

The conclusion is now included. Thank you for spotting this! 

 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has too much subsections. I suggest to reduce the number of subsections and create a section for the literature review. In addition the authors need to compare the methodology used with other available in the scientific literature and highlight why the options made are the best to achieve the objectives defined. The same about the results. The results obtained should be compared of those available in the literature about these topics. 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments.  

We have now made a final attempt to reduce the number of headings in the introduction – separating one explicit section for literature review, which presents a background to the problem that also leads to why the RRI framework is selected.

Methods. We have restated the study objective, in the methods justified why each step was done as well as tried to be more explicit about limitations. We disagree with the reviewer in that we do not see the point in listing  alternative methods that we could have applied but didn’t, as we could not know if another one would have been better unless we tried.  In short, to our knowledge there was no previous review of apps for Southeast Asia. This can be understood against two global literature reviews of agriculture apps in general, which illustrate a scarcity in Southeast Asia of the specific type of forecast-based agroadvisory apps that we are interested in (those that gives advice about what and how to grow). We therefore decide to go for a qualitative study to provide a deeper insight in response to the RRI framework, case studies better lend themselves for the limited content we ended up with (initially our intention was to complete both Table A2 with a larger number of apps but there was simply not comparable information). We explain why we search for apps via Google app stores, and when Google is exhausted we use Web of Science in particular on the apps that end up as case studies. 

Results. We have removed the last summary section from the results and integrated at respective heading in the discussion.

Discussion. Reducing the number of sections in the discussion is not possible. In the discussion, the results are compared with literature, which we are pointing out throughout. If the reviewer has particular examples where this is not satisfactory in his/her view, it would quite helpful to point out with reference to line numbers, rather than general comments.

We hope that the reviewer will agree with the substantial revisions we have made.