Assessing Public Perceptions on Coastal Access -Community Profile: A Case Study of Ngqushwa Local Municipality, South Africa

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper assessed the perceptions of communities about coastal access in NLM and the implication for coastal policy and human well-being. This study succeeded in gathering and assessing community perceptions about coastal issues in NLM. It‘s really a good job.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Title:

Assessing local community’s perceptions about coastal access in Ngqushwa Local Municipality: Implication for Coastal Policy and Sustainable Well-being

The title is appropriate for the content of the text and suitable for publication and mainly rated to the aims and scope of the journal

The article assessed the community’s perceptions about the accessibility of the coastline in Ngqushwa Local Municipality, to offer information critical to reshaping coastal policy, processes, and sustainable well-being by collecting quantitative interview methods.

The authors have done great work but will require to undergo the following revisions for further considerations.

General comment

1.            Authors mentioned the Ngqushwa coastal community’s participation. How big is the study area? Is there any information about the population?

2.            The author wishes to obtain a lot of information about coastal accessibility from the community. Accessibility in this article will be focused on what?

Abstract

The abstract is not completely representing the work done by the authors. It should be modified and elaborate on the work done. there should be some key results illustrating the major findings of this study.

Introduction

Introduction can be expected to be structured better according to the study problem. It is important to better define your topic and goals. What problems did you study? What are the main limitations? What do you want to achieve with your research? to appreciate your work

Methods

1.    Procedures in data collection to obtain results should be made clearer.

2.    How to determine the interview population so that the data to be obtained is representative enough to answer the stated objectives? 80 is a number or population number. Where did that number come from?

Conclusion

Conclusions should improve elaborately according to the supporting results of the study and It is suggested to add the importance/value/the meaning of the study in a few lines at the end of the conclusions for the International/National research and academic community.

Citation required

Sugianto, S.; Deli, A.; Miswar, E.; Rusdi, M.; Irham, M. The Effect of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on Flood Occurrence in Teunom Watershed, Aceh Jaya. Land 2022, 11, 1271. https://doi.org/10.3390/land11081271

Irham, M.; Rusydi, I.; Haridhi, H.A.; Setiawan, I.; Ilhamsyah, Y.; Deli, A.; Rusdi, M.; Siregar, A.M. Coastal Vulnerability of the West Coast of Aceh Besar: A Coastal Morphology Assessment. J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2021, 9, 815. https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse9080815

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

1. Include methodology flow chart for greater readability and understanding

2. Figure. 2.1. Spatial extension missing, include it, prepare a neat and clean map with good legends, right now too small, scale not to scale, orientation of north, not as per standards. The authors must see other standard research published in same or allied journals like Remote Sensing.

3. Figure 3.1 and so on.. please improve resolution, color selection and legends as per standards, right now legends unreadable.

4. Scale in figure 3.1 and so on...missing. Please include x and y axis with units right now missing, refer standard papers for reference

5. Check for all figures units, measurements and quality

6. Figure 3.5. poor quality, maps of poor spatial resolutions (NOAA image currently), avoid using google earth images. The authors may download Senitel data free of cost, high resolution data from it.

7. Validation of results missing, please include

8. improve discussion and conclusion

9. References too old, update with latest one.

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

I read the manuscript submitted by Mafumbu et al. for consideration of Sustainability with great interest. This manuscript presents a great idea regarding assessing the local community's perceptions about coastal access in Ngqushwa Local Municipality. Although the manuscript presents a good dataset and addresses relevant research questions, I consider that it cannot be accepted for publication in its present form.

As detailed in my comments hereafter, the manuscript needs a profound revision in the introduction and methods section, including adding several figures/charts/maps so that the readers will get more detailed information. More fundamentally, the article needs more precise and chronological methods, mainly how the authors chose their respondents and specific criteria. Since this article is about community perception, the authors should have standards related to their respondents from the beginning and not randomly choose. Also, since there are no criteria for selecting the respondents, the results may be biased.

Title

The authors can simplify the title to make it more concise, efficient, and informative.

Abstract

The abstract did not satisfactorily explain why this research is necessary; it needs more detailed information on the research background and methods.

-        Where is Ngqushwa Local Municipality? The readers of this journal are not only from specific regions/countries, so the authors should give more detailed information.

-        What did the authors mean by post-apartheid? What year?

-        How many respondents (key participants) were interviewed by the authors? What are the criteria?

-        What did the authors mean by "The collected data were processed using Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and SPSS software."

-        "The study's results revealed a lack of community awareness about coastal management policies and processes (98%)." Why?

-        "Three main obstacles to coastal access were private properties, distance to the shoreline, and financial constraints (70%)." How about the other 30%?

Introduction

From the beginning, the authors only talked about South Africa in general but did not mention their study area yet. There is no explanation yet why the authors choose Ngqushwa Local Municipality as their study area. Why not other local municipalities? Are there any specific conditions in Ngquswha? Furthermore, since the authors specifically focused on post-apartheid conditions, they need to explain more detail about the other eras (at least during pre-apartheid). Also, since the journal readers are worldwide, the authors should show their study area on a well-illustrated map with an inset of more well-known regions, i.e., South Africa, then go into detail to regional scale, then more detail to Ngqushwa Local Municipality.

Materials and Methods

-        L128: Please add additional information about isiXhosa, such as "one of the official languages of South Africa, i.e., isiXhosa."

-        How the authors decided on their respondents is not well explained yet. So, the community leaders provide the list of key community members (L131-132)? How many people lived in the study area (total population)? What are the criteria for randomly selecting 80 participants, for example, minimum age, occupations, minimum duration living in that area, etc.? How did the authors know that the samples they took could represent all the population in the study area?

-        Please add more detailed information on how the authors managed their data with Excel (L140). What did the authors mean by data storage and arrangement? Is it just for recapitulation? So why did the author specifically mention Excel since there is no detailed analysis inside it?

-        Based on Table 2.1., is it an open or closed interview, especially in Category B? If it is an open question, how do the authors manage and analyze their data?

-        L148-152: Please see my comments in the introduction related to a study area map.

-        L157-159: Is there any specific data to support this statement?

-        Figure 2.1.: Please repair your map. Please see my comments in the Introduction section related to a study area map.

-        Figure 2.1 shows that the study area's shoreline is about 40 km. With only 80 respondents, only two respondents for 1 km shoreline length. Are this number well represent all population? See my previous comments in this section.

Results

-        Why do the authors divide the age of respondents into four categories? Are there any specific reasons? Also, how about the interview results from a not reasonable age? In L182-183, the authors said 'majority', which means that not all respondents are qualified to interview.

-        Rather than a pie chart, I think it will be better if the authors visualize their research results in a block diagram.

-        Fig. 3.5.: See my previous comment about the map.

-        L267-269: Is there any specific data to support this statement?

-        The majority of respondents less frequently visit the beach (L224-225). How are the authors sure about the information they give since they also did not do any field validation, for example, road, parking, facilities, safety, etc.? Suppose the authors want to obtain more detailed information. In that case, we should agree that respondents who are frequently visited the coastal area know the situation better than people who are less regularly visit the beach. Also, since there are no criteria for choosing the respondents, the results may be biased. For example, suppose we asked educated people about the regulation. In that case, there is more possibility that they know about that regulation and vice versa.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Here are my comments on the revisions that have been made:

1. Many changes have been made and it is very good because the revision has included many suggestions from reviews.

2. The tables shown are very difficult to understand because the format is not following the proper rules and the layout is also irregular (Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, and Table 5)

3. Figure 2 should be placed after the image and there are two Figure 2 in the manuscript (Images should be sequential and not double)

4. The layout of some Images is very inappropriate (see Figure 6, Figure 11, and Figure 13)

5. What is the meaning of the number 8 in lines 609 - 625

6. Conclusion (line 625) is mixed with discussion and this greatly disturbs the format of the manuscript

7. The conclusion is too long so that it can be summarized again into a shorter one.

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

I think there is a problem when converting Word files to pdf (?) because there are many sentences or descriptions of pictures and tables that are not neat. The authors should recheck their manuscript. 

Author Response

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