Impact Assessment of COVID-19 Severity on Environment, Economy and Society towards Affecting Sustainable Development Goals

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is well structured, interesting and clear in all its parts. However, it needs to be revised in some aspects such as:

-        the introduction does not adequately discuss the SDGs issue. Adequate literature on the subject is not proposed, nor a clear framework to explain its origin, promoter, etc. Moreover there is not any literature that offers a critical look at the SDGs;

-      it is necessary to insert a literature review of other research that have so far tried to develop a criterion for evaluating the impacts on the SDGs (even if the impacts of covid 19 are an original proposal by the authors, check if there are other research that have studied the impacts on the SDGs and how they processed the results);

-     in the methodology, specify which Covid period is referred to for the assessment of impacts (from March 2020 to today?) and at what scale (all over the world? All countries involved?). If you choose to make an assessment on a global scale, it must be indicated within the limits of the research because very different and difficult to compare territorial contexts are being considered;

-    in the conclusions it would be interesting to propose a future development of this first method of analysis.

Finally a general reading of the text is required to correct errors such as the one in line 114.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for very helpful comments and suggestion for improving the manuscript. The respond to the comment is attached. Thank you. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is interesting, in accordance with the profile of the Sustainability journal, and it is based on extensive research activities, Materials are well structured and presented in the reader-friendly way.  However, there are a few critical remarks as presented below. 

Major points:

1.      References are not prepared in accordance with the requirements. For example, the opening position should be as follows:

Kumar, D., Malviya, R., Sharma, P.K. Corona virus: a review of COVID-19, EJMO, 4 (2020) 8-25.

Also, DOI should be added if it is available.

2.      It is necessary to edit the text for English content. A few suggestions can be found in the file attached. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for very helpful comments and suggestion for improving the manuscript. The respond to the comment is attached. Thank you. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Although the topic of your research is definitely interesting and up to date, I have some concerns regarding your study, namely regarding the methodology, concerns which in my opinion impact significantly the conclusions. The methodology is not clear nor detailed, which raises some questions, especially since the method chose was that of expert elicitation. How were the experts chosen, how exactly did they consider the relevant evidence for each category, was there anything overlooked? How were they interviewed, how were the questions elaborated, what other research tools were used, did questions mainly focused on facts or on normative judgments? What was the timeframe of the research? Also, there are no additional information about the workshop that is included in figure 1.

Also, the conclusions should be expanded. You should also make a better case for how your paper adds to the existing body of knowledge. 

Not all references could be found in the text. 

Given the above, I will recommend a major revision.

Best of luck with your research!

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for very helpful comments and suggestion for improving the manuscript. The response to the comment is attached. Thank you. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The article, titled Impact Assessment of COVID-19 Severity on Environment, Economy and Society Towards Affecting Sustainable Development Goals, addresses issues related to the impact of COVID-19 on the environment, economy and society. It shows how far the pandemic has been affecting as a threat to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

In my opinion, the Introduction contains all the necessary information that shows the directions adopted by the authors.

In the second part, the authors describe the Methods of the study. They explain the methodology of the conducted research. I believe that this is a part that needs to be expanded so that the reader understands the reasons for using the indicated method. In section 2.1, I believe that the description of the referenced expert method is sufficiently covered.

In the next section, the authors also sufficiently analyzed SDGs goals and targets. The tables included in section 2.2 contain, in my opinion, a precise description and are clear to understand. However, the item lacks, in my opinion, a few sentences of summary under the last table.

Conclusions, which are insufficient at this stage, also need to be expanded. Particularly praiseworthy is the collection of references the authors relied on, which indicates the right direction they adopted at the planning stage.

I highly rate the other issues realized in the article.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for very helpful comments and suggestion for improving the manuscript. The response to the comment is attached. Thank you. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx