Energy Efficiency and GHG Emissions Mapping of Buildings for Decision-Making Processes against Climate Change at the Local Level

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents GIS study of energy efficiency of the buildings. Overall, the proposed approach is interesting and can benefit the local government efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the city. The paper needs revision for the English language as it has numerious mistakes, some of which are highlighted below:

1. Line 16: "greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions" should be "greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions"
2. Ln 26: Is 32.000 t actually 3 2t or 32,000 t? Comma is used to delineate thousands, dot is used to separate the decimal points. All numbers throughout the manuscript should be checked and corrected. To ensure accuracy, only 2 decimal points should be presented.
3. Ln 73, what is accurante?
4. Ln 139 rephrase "has specially interest on GHG"
5. Section 2.2. It is not sure still how is the energy efficiency calculated based on the building rating. This section will need to be better explained because it is the most critical for the study. Specifically, it is not sure if the databases of the Energy Agency, used to estimate the energy and GHG related emissions of the studied buildings, gives information of the actual energy/emissions or just lists the letters A to G. The process used to calculate energy efficiency of the buildings will need to be better explained.
6. Ln 161 rephrase "which allow characterize"
7. Ln 174 "fields showed in" should be shown
8. Ln 185 rephrase "For the example of Spain, is available"
9. Table 3 should also show the colours
10. The Conclusions, as well as the abstract, should highlight the major findings, not only explaining how the method can be useful, but actually how the results can be interpreted to become useful for replicating the same approach in other different cities.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Review, round 1

The submited article entitled “Energy efficiency and GHG emissions mapping of buildings for decision-making processes against climate change at local level” provide an interesting tool for decisión-makers about climate change and global warming, so the article may report an important impact in the sientific community.

however, there are some aspects that need to be improved for publication in the scientific journal.

Introduction:

It is necessary to indicate a little more extensively the tools currently available in the decisions-maker.

Are there authors who have tried to perform a GIS before?

How is such decision-making currently carried out?

References should be incorporated with such tools.

Materials and Methods:

In the parragraph 2.2. “Data gathering, calculation and characterization of energy efficiency and GHG emissions of buildings” line 152, you must take into account that there is an important number of residential buildings with no use and there are closed.

How have you taken this factor into account? Are there any statistics on closed houses in that municipality?

the same question is applicable to commercial spaces, since at present, in Europe, there is a fairly high percentage of closure, and I suppose that the studied municipality will not be an exception.

Results and discussion:

It would have been interesting to include within the GIS the input of the existing green spaces in the urban area. In this way, when you calculate the tons of CO2, it could be offset with those absorbed by the green areas.

It would be interesting to improve the GIS information with the mentioned input.

References:

All references must be adapted to the template provide for all mdpi journals.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript is interesting and the study was carried out with adequate scientific methodologies. In my opinion the manuscript deserves to be published once the authors answer to the following comments.

Introduction

1. For the sake of readability, at the end of Section 1 the authors should describe how the paper is structured.

Methodology

1. The title of Section 2 could be renamed as: The proposed methodology. The term Material is misunderstanding.
2. The description of the proposed methodology could be improved. First, it could be better to insert at the beginning of Section 2 an outline about the methodology diagrams flows (how many steps, the aim of each step, the actors involved in each step, etc.); maybe the use of UML or SysML could help authors describing the proposed system view in a more structured fashion.
3. Could the proposed approach be generalized to other types of cities?
4. The authors claim that the proposed approach could be used to improve energy efficiency and sustainability of buildings both at local and district level. To this aim, the authors mainly refer to projects or dated works. However, to further corroborate this statement, the authors could refer to the following papers, whereas it is evident that energy behavior monitoring methodologies for existing buildings may be used both for online (based on real-time operation of buildings, e.g., using a building energy management system), and offline (based on strategic choices for structural changes) decision making tools: https://doi.org/10.1109/CoASE.2015.7294035, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2010.05.012, https://doi.org/10.1109/SMC.2019.8913892, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2017.09.587.

Case study

5. To corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the authors should highlight the advantages with respect to other state-of-the-art alternative techniques.

Conclusions

6. Conclusions needs to be extended. It just consists of few sentences. It should include the unique contributions of the paper and present further implications for future research and many managerial insights based on the results of the study, as well as limitations.

Minor

7. The resolution of figures should be improved (e.g., Fig. 1, 5).
8. The authors should check that all the used acronyms are explained. 
9. Mainly the English is good and there are only a few typos. However the paper should be carefully rechecked

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have revised the paper according to the recommendations.

Author Response

Thank you!

Reviewer 3 Report

Previous comments and concerns have been sufficiently addressed. In the revised paper several improvements have been added.

In order to highlight the scope and the contribution of the paper, the authors could consider add the discussion reported as answer to comment #4 in the revised paper.

Author Response

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