Assessing the Adaptive Capacity of Households to Climate Change in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript assessed the adaptive capacity of households using a Local Adaptive Capacity (LAC) framework. Four sites of the Central Rift Valley (CRV) of Ethiopia are studied and the contributions of main components to adaptive capacity are quantified. The article has moderate novelty and significance. However, the major issue is the relation of climate and proposed method is limited in this research. Besides, the English of some sentences and expressions must be refined.
General comments:
More information about the study area should be given. The article only gives a very brief geographic description which has been presented in Figure 1. The authors should give more information related to this research such as climate, environment, household, and other socioeconomic information of this study area.
This study applied the LAC framework and introduced the concept of the framework. The authors should explain why the LAC framework was adopted and its advantages and disadvantages compared with other frameworks.
The article claimed the study site is one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change and one of most environmentally fragile areas. Is there any data to support that? Is a map of the sample points available? I suggest to provide more background information about the sampling procedure because not all readers are familiar with this study area.
About Table 1, please explain the impact of hypothesized relation in the context. The authors may also consider starting a new section to describe the indicators.
The PCA was widely adopted in the article. Please introduce the principle of PCA and briefly explain the reason why applying this algorithm in the experiment. Will the other classification methods generate different results?
The experiment results were presented in Figure 4 and Table 2. However, the result did not reflect the impact of climate on adaptive capacity. Actually, the analysis and assessment of the relationship between climate and adaptive capacity were very limited in my point of view. The authors should focus more on climate-related analysis to make this article acceptable in a climate journal.
Author Response
The comments of reviewer 1 has been addressed.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The findings that the authors put forward with this study are important and could be significant for the larger project of preparing for adaptation to climate change. If the authors can adequately address some of the issues with the paper, it should be published.
There seems to be an ethical issue with the last author of the paper, who contributed nothing to its production. Ute Schmiedel cannot be listed as an author if that person did not contribute to any part of the paper.
The framing of the discussion in section 1 makes claims about the insufficiency of data and of local level studies and then cites sources that are 6-10 years old. There are updated studies, which may not preclude the author’s claim, but would make it more convincing
(for example: Siders, A. R. "Adaptive capacity to climate change: A synthesis of concepts, methods, and findings in a fragmented field." Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 10, no. 3 (2019): e573.
Mortreux, Colette, and Jon Barnett. "Adaptive capacity: Exploring the research frontier." Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 8, no. 4 (2017): e467.
Abdul-Razak, Majeed, and Sylvia Kruse. "The adaptive capacity of smallholder farmers to climate change in the Northern Region of Ghana." Climate Risk Management 17 (2017): 104-122.)
This study makes two surprising findings. The first is the negative values that correlate to assets and governance, and the positive values that correlate to entitlements, knowledge, and innovation.
This goes against prevailing wisdom that governance and assets are what people need, and is very important indeed. I have some questions about the numbers provided to reach those conclusions.
For both the Household assets and the Social assets, it is unclear to this reader how the negative value is determined from the values provided in the detailed subject breakdown. Both sections have negative values, while all values in the detailed breakdown have positive values.
For the Decision making section this same phenomenon occurs, a negative overall value, but only positive values in the detailed breakdown.
Please explain this.
The other important finding you cite is the importance of woodland access to climate adaptability. This gets lost in your discussion and in my opinion deserves more attention. Please include a discussion of this.
A related issue that I see in your data, is that there are some numbers in Natural assets that raise questions you do not address.
It looks like with productive farmland, grazing land, and water there is a problem of access. I would like to see a discussion of how access entitlements to these resources are decided. To what extent do land governance policies contribute to access? To what extent is it locally determined heritage and inheritance contributors? In addition, how does woodland access compare to farmland and water?
I would like some explanation and contextualization of these numbers.
The methodology is very detailed with evidence of advanced statistical analysis. There is, however, no discussion for how participant households within Kebeles were selected, no description of the socioeconomic, environmental, or governmental make-up of the Kebeles selected to justify why they were chosen over others, and the methods used for collecting qualitative data are not adequately described- only an in-person survey is mentioned.
This leads to the discussion, which is rather flat. This might be because there was insufficient qualitative data. I am very curious about what factors contribute to the numbers presented and how these might vary between households and Kebeles. Also my comments above related to the dramatic differences in some of the values associated with Natural assets could be contextualized and explained in the discussion.
I have just a couple of other observations to contribute to your research. The first is that it might be worthwhile to question the prevailing wisdom that says salary work is more resistant to climate vulnerability. This could be short-term thinking, since in all cases the wages paid to individuals emerge out of more carbon-intensive activities that are often damaging to ecosystems as well. The second is how to mobilize the power of local innovation, and perhaps not “improve the contributions” as you say of institutions and entitlements as well as household’s knowledge and information, but rather to “better understand” what exactly those contributions are, which does not come out in your discussion. And the third is to think about availability of credit (coded positively in your framework) and its evil twin, the presence of debt, which gets coded negatively in your results, but was not even in your framework. The values of credit and debt can be illuminating in terms of how families remain resilient and adaptive in the face of changing ecosystems. Finally, when thinking about recommendations for further action, the importance of woodland access should figure largely, since these wooded landscapes are often regarded as 'unproductive' in the prevailing economic environment and in many places are being rapidly converted to farmland.
Author Response
The comments of reviewer 2 are well addressed.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors explore the different components of the adaptive capacity of households in the Central Rift Valley (CRV) of Ethiopia and quantify their relative contributions. An interesting aspect of the manuscript is the choice of conducting a systemic analysis by a Local Adaptive Capacity (LAC), considering not the single effects of the parameters that may or may not be useful in the adaptability of householders in the CRV, but rather their work integrated into a wider framework. The capacity to adapt at the local level, in turn, depends on asset base, innovation, knowledge and information, institutions and entitlements, and flexible and forward-thinking decision-making and governance. These major components are then further divided into sub-components for a total of sixty indicators. The resulting indices give the contribution of the specific component. Another interesting aspect is the use of the polychoric PCA for the attribution of the "weights" of the variables.
Overall, the work is well written, and the statistical analysis conducted seems rigorous to me. What I feel like asking the authors is to insert a supplementary material concerning the attribution of "weights" through the polychoric PCA, trying to explain it in greater detail, which has no place directly in the text.
The discussion of the results is also well done and ultimately, I was very interested in reading it. That the Institutions and entitlements have the highest influence on adaptive capacity followed by knowledge and information and innovation could be generalized, as well as forward-looking decision-making and governance and asset base made the least contributions.
The work presented can be considered as a vade mecum for policymakers to define operational strategies to face the challenges posed by the effects linked to climate change on a local basis.
Author Response
The comments of reviewer 3 are adressed.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The point-to-point response to my comments and suggestion was adequate. Thank you for the revisions.
Author Response
The comment was that moderate English changes are required. Accordingly, Dr. Recha and Dr. Ute have gone through the manuscript again and made moderate changes and it is now in good shape.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Thanks for your thoughtful treatment of reviewer comments. The paper is much improved
In the methods section, you have not yet described how and why you chose the individual households. Even in small villages there can be substantial class differences, which translate into resource access. How did you ensure that your household sampling reflected the socio-economic diversity within the Kebeles. Please add one or two sentences to explain your method to ensure there is no class bias reflected in your data.
The discussion of woodlands is very informative and an important intervention into our collective thinking about climate change adaptive capacities.
nice work
Author Response
The comments were that minor spell check is required and that the reason for selecting individual households was not described well. Accordingly, Dr. Recha and Dr. Ute have gone through the entire manuscript and edited it. Now, the language of the manuscript is in good shape.
Secondly, a sentence explaining the reason why and how individual households in each Kebele was selected is added (Line number 216 to 218).
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
