China’s Climate Change Policy Attention and Forestry Carbon Sequestration Growth

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

1. The author needs to carefully examine the meaning of CCPA, policy documents, and policy implementation, and whether the paper substitutes the three for each other.

2. The paper uses the method of text analysis to calculate CCPA and EPU, but the direction of action of CCPA and EPU is opposite. So, is there any difference in the method of text analysis? The paper should provide an explanation for this.

3. The selection of CPU variables is based on existing literature and is related to the United States. So, why not use Chinese directly? Is it because there is no CPU in China? Is there any literature on using CPUs from the United States to study FSCs from other countries? The paper should provide an explanation for this. Since the CPU is data from the United States, how does it correspond to each province in China and then establish a panel dataset?

4. Figure 1 has little value.

5. Lines 198-218, this is a description of the current situation in China, and there are overlaps with the introduction section, so it is not suitable to be placed here. This part should be analyzed theoretically based on literature.

6. Lines 238-252, what is written here is only China's practice, and it cannot be seen that there are several channels mentioned, at least the explanation is not clear.

7. The introduction introduces some important measures taken by the Chinese government since 2020, but the data in the paper is only available until 2017, which is a pity.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Reviewer’s comments on manuscript # forests-2691352-peer-review-v1: China’s Climate Change Policy Attention and Forestry Carbon 2 Sequestration Growth.

This article studies the connection between China’s environmental policy attention and forest carbon sinks. The policy attention is measured using the documents issued by China’s central government on climate change and policy statements aiming at mitigation of climate change. In addition, the effects of two indices measuring 1) the climate policy uncertainty in United States, and 2) the economic policy uncertainty index in China. Classical two way fixed effects panel data regression models are used, and in addition to the above three explanatory variables with policy interest, large set of control variables describing the economic activity level in China are used in the analysis.

Paper, in my opinion, is well organized and easy to read. The results are interesting, and policy recommendations given at the concluding part of the manuscript can be derived from the results of the analysis. I have some clarifying comments and questions that I have included as sticky notes in the enclosed Pdf file, and I feel it unnecessary to re-print them here.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

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.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The introduction is hard to understand. One exemplary sentence: "... we quantitatively identify the relationships between ????, ???, and ??? with 94 ???, respectively. We also examine the interactive effects of ???? with ??? or ??? on 95 ???. " Until here CPU has not yet need defined.

It is probably interesting and relevant to assess how climate change policy attention - CCPA - is reflected in policy documents and what the trends of CCPA are. Suggesting that there is any causal link between forest carbon stock (FCS) does not make much sense. Why and how forest cover, wood volume and therefore forest carbon stocks have changed in China over the last 30 years or so has been extensively discussed in the literature. CCPA is not (yet) of any influence on this. 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript " China’s Climate Change Policy Attention and Forestry Carbon Sequestration Growth” is interesting. In this manuscript, the authors used the Chinese Government's Work Reports and Five-Year Plans to construct an index named CCPA, which reflects the government's emphasis on climate change and forestry in China. They examined the impact of the CCPA, the adjusted Climate Policy Uncertainty (CPU) index from the U.S., or the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index from China on the Chinese forest carbon stocks (FCS), comprehensively. They found that CCPA significantly promotes the growth of FCS, while CPU or EPU inhibits its growth, and the CCPA’s promoting effect on FCS growth is stronger than the inhibiting effect of CPU or EPU.

After having read your manuscript I found it scientifically good and remarkable for researchers.

The purpose of this study is clear, the data collection is reasonable and feasible, and the sampling point coverage is rich and comprehensive. The analysis method of the article is sound. And the discussion content is in detail and sufficient. However, I suggest an English revision with a native speaker to avoid misspellings, and the manuscript could benefit from a list of abbreviations at the beginning. Thus, the manuscript needs minor revisions.

 Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

General comment

This manuscript is a timely example to construct an index named ????, which reflects the government's emphasis on climate change and forestry in China. The paper is well structured. The introduction provided a good overview of the background information with corresponded reference, and it demonstrated the need for the current study taking into account worldwide discussion about forest carbon sink, its important role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Section 2 describes three hypotheses and their development. Section 3 is a detailed description of regression techniques used in the research. Sections 4-6 consider step-by-step different results and approaches which test the hypothesis. Based on it the authors provided satisfactory conclusions and implications.

The manuscript is too detailed and long. I would suggest some of the sections to move in supplementary material section.

But there is an issue which should be considered in the MS. In this study the authors used three different indexes as independent variables. I am sure some of them are highly correlated (inter-collinearity) (e.g., ???? and ???) which is real problem in different regression approaches. I recommend the authors to provide the certain correlation analysis between indexes to avoid this issue. The potential readers need to understand how those issues can be resolved.

I would suggest to publish the MS after major revision.

Specific comments

Line 15 The abbreviation ???? should be decoded.

Line 48 The Forests is not an economical journal, the abbreviation GDP should be decoded.

Lines 308 The Dot should be removed

Line 316 The Dot should be removed

Line 452 The Dot should be removed

Section 3.2 I recommend to add a needed reference concerning each regression (e.g. mixed model (reference)).

Lines 480-481 ‘Sobel test’ – reference is needed.

Table 1 Something is wrong with unit description of the indexes. All indexes are relative (unitless). What does ‘\’ (see CPU and EPU) mean?

Figure 1 should be re-built with all needed axes names. Moreover, I recommend adding ??? or ?P? curves there.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf