Key Pathways to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals in Three Polar Regions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The present article Key pathways to achieve Sustainable Development Goals in  Three Polar Regions" deals an interesting and updated topic.  However the author should add a separate sections of limitation and challenges associated with these  polar region to achieve the goal

In addition also  need to add a section  on the  main  challenges  and future perspective to achieve the sustainable  goal in the  polar region.

Author Response

Thanks for your suggestions. As the author says, the paper is a review or opinion paper.

Limitation and challenges associated with these polar regions to achieve the SDGs is actually discussed in different places in the study, especially in section 1, section 2.1, section 3.1, section 4.1 and section 5.

The details are as follows: 1) The limitation and challenges to the sustainable development of the Arctic mainly come from the imbalance between the indigenous regions of the Arctic high latitude and other regions (discussed in section 2). 2) The limitations and challenges to sustainable development in Antarctica mainly depend on the permanent validity of the Antarctic treaty system (discussed in section 3). 3) The challenges to sustainable development of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau mainly comes from how to deal with the improvement of people's welfare and the protection of the ecological environment (discussed in section 4).

Especially, in terms of sustainable development indicators, the current UN 2030SDGs lacks indicators on the sustainability of the Arctic indigenous population, welfare, health and culture (discussed in section 3). In terms of sustainable development data, these polar regions lack an observation system of climate and environmental change, and their sustainable development research lacks detailed data support (discussed in section 5). At the same time, there is a lack of data platform and implementation of international research plan for the sustainable development research in these polar regions. These issues are described in detail in section 5, as follows:

The TPR is closely related to the climate system and its impacts, and it is essential to consider them as a whole when conducting intensive research (Wilkinson et al., 2016). At present, the two difficulties or shortcomings in the research of sustainable development in the TPR are (1) the insufficient monitoring of data (Neumann et al., 2015) and lack of an international data-sharing platform (Lin et al., 2020), and (2) the lack of international big science research plans. To a certain extent, this has affected the research process of polar sustainable development. To this end, countries in or outside the TPR should strengthen cooperation, strengthen the monitoring of environmental change, increase the monitoring elements and their data, and develop and establish a “Three Pole Regions international data platform” (Pertierra et al., 2021) based on an original international database (Carroll et al., 2021).

The common and critical pathways (section 2-5) are proposed in the paper is future perspective to achieve SDGs in Three Pole Regions. It is therefore recommended that all countries strictly abide and implement by the Paris Agreement in order to promote global climate action (climate change mitigation) for achieving the TPR’s SDGs (The recommendation has been extended to the last paragraph of section 5).

The existence of the above problems and challenges is the original intention of this article formation. If limitation, challenges, future perspective as a separate section is added, it may break the structure of the article. Thus, i think it is better to keep the original structure.

Reviewer 2 Report

The Antarctic, Arctic and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) are the main distribution areas of the global cryosphere, which are strongly affected by global climate change. The study builds on existing research to suggest a common and critical path for TPR to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS). The study has important practical implications for promoting multilateral cooperation between polar and non-polar countries to achieve equally beneficial Sustainable development Goals. However, TPRs does not exist in isolation, but is closely linked to other regions. It is suggested to supplement the climate data, disaster data, human and economic data of the three places, as well as their correlation. It is therefore recommended to add global climate action (mitigating climate change) to achieve the TPRs SDGs in the conclusion section. Other specific comments are as follows:

1、 L83 key pathway should be key pathways.

2、 L84-86 the sentence “This study holds great practical significance to promote the cooperation between polar and non-regional countries to achieve equally beneficial SDGs” should be changed to “This study holds great practical significance to promote multilateral cooperation between polar and non-polar countries to achieve equally beneficial SDGs”.

3、 L91 “Antarctic Treaty System” in the article appears 6 times, suggesting abbreviations.

4、 L99 “The sustainable development of the Antarctic region” can change to “Antarctic sustainable development”.

5、 L121 "At the same time" instead of "on the contrary" might be a better expression.

6、 L133-137 The two sentences are repeated and need to be revised.

7、 L255-257 The sentence “The human development of science and technology, climate and environmental change, tourism development, and culture activities will continue to be highly dependent on the Arctic countries and northern channel” should be change to “The development of science and technology, the response to climate change, commerce, tourism and human activities will continue to be highly dependent on the Arctic countries and northern channel”.

Author Response

Thanks to the reviewer's comments, data is the basis for supporting research on sustainable development in Three Pole Region and is essential for its sharing. To this end, the paper adds the discussion on the production, preparation and sharing of population, economy, climate, disaster and cryosphere data in the tri-polar region, and emphasizes the need to improve the spatio-temporal resolution and accuracy of the data (see Section V). At the same time, in the last paragraph of the last section, the paper adds a statement on the importance of global climate action for achieving sustainable development in Three Pole Region.