Pathways to Modelling Ecosystem Services within an Urban Metabolism Framework

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear author(s)

Your paper on the” Pathways to modelling ecosystem services within an urban metabolism framework “addresses a relevant topic in Sustainability  by the issue of identifying approaches to improve the assessment of UES within UM frameworks. However, few improvements are needed before I can recommend the manuscript for publication in Sustainability. Indeed, I consider that the article needs some revisions.

I must mention that my comments and suggestions are mainly on Urban metabolism parts, as I don’t really consider myself as an expert of UES issues. In all, this article is excellent and well written. I think it can go further in concept proposals or a scientific field because the authors are legitimate to do so.

My main points are as follows:

L. 54 regarding this sentence: “local ecosystems’ capacity to supply ES”, I think that the “local” issue, and geographical and territorial issues, could be more questioned.

L76-77 : “a large research domain linking the disciplines of engineering, political ecology and political economy, industrial ecology, social ecology, and ecological economics (Beloin-Saint-Pierre et al., 2017; Broto et al., 2012; Ferrão & Fernández, 2013; Pincetl, 2012).” We do not see the link between disciplines and references. For example, the article (Beloin-Saint-Pierre et al., 2017) omits this diversity of scientific fields and focuses only on industrial ecology. Other articles like the one you quoted from Newell and Cousins explain this argument better. In addition, the literature lacks articles that link industrial ecology and urban political ecology in studies of urban metabolism.

The table 2 is too big and hard to read. The authors might find a way to make it fit on one page.

Section 3 Results. I'm surprised you do not have more considered articles on urban metabolism that studies organic waste and urban agriculture.

P11 the authors should explain and justify precisely this methodological choice: “These ES groups adhere to no specific classification system, but CICES v5.1 (Haines-Young & Potschin-Young, 2018) was used as a guide.” As it stands, it's not really clear when it's important for the demonstration.

The Figure 3  is very interesting, but the paragraph commenting on the figure is too descriptive. The reader is waiting for more concrete scientific recommendations. What are the new fields to develop? With which tools concretely? What are the concepts proposals of the authors?

Author Response

Thank you for your comments which I found constructive and helpful.

Responses to your specific points are in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript presented for this review is very well written. All parts are well elaborated and clearly explained. The contents of the paper is very rich, and thanks to a clear structure, the reader is not lost. 

The review of UM studies that intersect with the ES research field is an added value of the paper.

Author Response

To Reviewer 2:

Thank you for the positive feedback.

As far as I can see there are no specific points to be addressed.