Taxonomy and Ex Ante Metric of Climate Change Adaptation Projects Recorded in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as Updated for Conference of the Parties-26 (COP-26)
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Review Comments: sustainability-2079488
The paper reports the Taxonomy and ex-ante metric of climate change adaptation projects recorded in the nationally determined contributions. The paper fails to establish any new or interesting finding that would warrant its publication in Sustainability. This is immediately clear when one reads the abstract section, which is a collection of obvious/general statements, rather than a set of new findings that derive from an original analysis after explaining a brief methods used in the study. There is no logical discussion in this manuscript (repetition of results only). Explanations of methods are inadequate. Overall, I recommend rejection
The work reported suffers from several major limitations
· The writing and English need thorough polishing. Numerous grammatical and rhetorical issues too.
· Authors should provide better and more current literature in the field.
· The methodology is not described in brief. Authors must describe the methods in detail. How they select the climate models for their study?
· It is not clear why the authors have used the reported approaches in the study? It is as if the authors have picked techniques that are available to them and went ahead with their use. No justification or support is provided.
· minimal insights from the results reported with no possible contribution to existing literature related to future projections.
Abstract is not written well. The authors need to explain a little bit about the methods they have used in the study and then discuss res
Author Response
Point 1: The writing and English need thorough polishing. Numerous grammatical and rhetorical issues too.
Response 1: Okay, thanks for the feedback. We entirely rewrote several chapters of our article and revised it thoroughly. It has since been reviewed by a professional English native speaker.
Point 2: Authors should provide better and more current literature in the field.
Response 2: as for the references, we made a bibliography of what seemed relevant to us within the literature of adaptation metrics and taxonomy. It is a field still in progress and much of it can be found among experts (IDDRI, GIZ, UNDP, UEA…) more than in academic circles, especially when it comes to ex-ante metrics.
Point 3: The methodology is not described in brief. Authors must describe the methods in detail. How they select the climate models for their study?
Response 3: The methodology has already been described more extensively by Boutang et al, 2020 in their article published in “Sustainability”. But as you are suggesting it, we have provided some details on climate models and other topics.
Point 4: It is not clear why the authors have used the reported approaches in the study? It is as if the authors have picked techniques that are available to them and went ahead with their use. No justification or support is provided.
Response 4: we feel that our approach does not refer to any existing approach regarding climate metrics. We suggested an innovation inspired from an analogy with adaptive mechanisms in living beings (Richard Dawkins). We transposed a concept coming from biology to human actions and expressed it statistically. Similarly, we intended to suggest a taxonomy made of a combination of statistics and expert judgments.
Point 5: Minimal insights from the results reported with no possible contribution to existing literature related to future projections.
Response 5: we entirely rewrote the discussion and conclusion parts so that our possible contribution is made more obvious.
Point 6: Abstract is not written well. The authors need to explain a little bit about the methods they have used in the study and then discuss…
Response 6: The abstract has been entirely rewritten. Several details have been added to the description of the methodology and this has been added to the discussion chapter.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
Thank you for providing the opportunity to review your paper. It addresses an important issue in an interesting way, and is well written.
My main comment is with regards to the interpretation and explanation of the metrics being used. The abstract and introduction (as well as the indicator name) frame them as a measure of 'fitness,' which initially made me think they were based on some assessment of how effective a given 'key' would be to address a given hazard. After studying the metrics, I realized that they are more akin to a measure of how frequently a key was chosen by governments. The two would be similar if we assume that governments tend to choose projects based on what best addresses a given challenge, but I imagine that in practice there are many other issues that come into play. For example, powerful stakeholders likely have a strong influence to promote their projects in many countries, and governments may opt for less expensive projects over more expensive projects without conducting a full cost benefit analysis. I would suggest making these limitations clear in the abstract and introduction, and framing/ naming the measure as something more like frequency/ popularity than 'fitness.' If readers want to assume that governments make optimal adaptation choices, they could then interpret them as fitness, but otherwise a potential project with a high score might more accurately be seen as following current trends.
In summary, I think this is a useful metric, but I think its limitations should be clearly explained in the introduction/ abstract and when the measure is introduced. I would characterize it as a measure of how frequently (in a relative sense) given measures have been chosen to date, which is an interesting and useful metric that is probably related to project 'fitness,' but shouldn't be used as a sole criterion to select projects.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for reviewing our work and providing interesting comments and remarks.
Like you, we also thought that the credibility of this work was based on the criteria for the selection of projects by governments and that the latter may however be biased in some countries. We will then notify this as one of the limitations in our work, especially in the summary, introduction and conclusion.
For the measures obtained in this work, which are called "fitness", they express the relevance value of a key (project category) in relation to a given hazard intensity. These measures are different from the frequency alone, although obviously frequency is at the root of the fitness metric. This is because fitness is a statistic, measured partly from the frequency of projects (this is the true content of the contingency tables), and partly on relative distances.
As you know, the fitness values result from the dimensions obtained during a statistical treatment (correspondence analysis) from the contingency tables. This analysis allowed us to have the vector projection of a key with respect to a lock (intensity of a hazard). Page 7 of our article, it is given that “The vector distance between an environmental key and a hazard intensity is calculated as follows:
Dij = (see Word document for formula)
Fitness is the 1 - D'ij, where D'ij is the normalized vector distance between environmental key i and hazard intensity j.
As a result of this, the difference in value between the frequency and the fitness measure is that a key (project category) may have a low frequency on a given intensity but with a high fitness measure or have the same frequency but with different fitness values.
For example, in contingency table 3. Storm, you can see (Cf. Word document for illustrations)
Whereas the fitness calculations indicate (see Word document for illustrations)
Take the example of “human settlement”: although frequency is the same between low/moderate & acute hazard intensities, the fitness value are not the same. Same thing regarding a frequency of 0 in both high severe intensities, but yet fitness values are not zero, but 0,13 and 0,25 respectively.
We will consider your comments and explain the difference the sole frequency and the relative distance between a key and a lock, as best as we can.
Best regards,
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the possibility to read the research which suggests a path when measuring climate change projects. Even if the analysis of previous research could be expanded to reveal a research gap more focused, the findings bring a sufficient contribution to the field. The authors might wish to improve the introduction and further research directions.
Author Response
Thank you for the possibility to read the research which suggests a path when measuring climate change projects. Even if the analysis of previous research could be expanded to reveal a research gap more focused, the findings bring a sufficient contribution to the field. The authors might wish to improve the introduction and further research directions.
Response : We thank you a lot for your kind comments. Regarding the introduction and further research directions, we tried to make improvements in the article.
Best regards
Reviewer 4 Report
I really liked this paper. I thought it was informative and well-done. Other than a few issues that I feel should be resolved prior to publication.
The most prominent is the cut-off of “4” as being more significant with respect to the number of occurrences. I would think it would need something more than “it seems” as the selection criteria. It could be as simple as professional opinion or experience – but that should be noted.
The tables showing the adaption fitness coefficient tables also should be consistent in their explanation and their coding. It is unclear why certain categories were selected for discussion with respect to Table 4. Meanwhile, the color coding appears to be slightly different for each table in the appendix.
There are also some technical and style matters – ranging from extra verbiage to the need to explain an acronym to table readability to missing paragraph indentations. These are all noted in the comments of the reviewed manuscript.
Once this is done, I feel the paper will be ready for publication.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
I really liked this paper. I thought it was informative and well-done. Other than a few issues that I feel should be resolved prior to publication.
Point 1 : The most prominent is the cut-off of “4” as being more significant with respect to the number of occurrences. I would think it would need something more than “it seems” as the selection criteria. It could be as simple as professional opinion or experience – but that should be noted.
Response 1: The limitation of the threshold of occurrences to 4 was preferred for various reasons.
- We decreased the plethoric volume of word pairs obtained by the R code. For instance, the drought hazard analysis obtained more than 200 pairs occurring at least 4 times.
- We saw that in many instances, pairs occurring three times or less could be found within the same adaptation project and across different projects. This finally facilitated the taxonomy.
Point 2: The tables showing the adaption fitness coefficient tables also should be consistent in their explanation and their coding. It is unclear why certain categories were selected for discussion with respect to Table 4. Meanwhile, the color coding appears to be slightly different for each table in the appendix.
Response 2: Agreed, we acknowledge the inconsistency in coding of some tables. This has been corrected accordingly in the article. Regarding you second comment, we just picked-up several examples for clarification and illustration, not because they were specific in any sense. Obviously, we could not comment and explain all categories and all projects. We hope that those examples enlighten the tables. We will take your point into consideration and make a comment within the article about the meaning of the given example.
Point 3 : There are also some technical and style matters – ranging from extra verbiage to the need to explain an acronym to table readability to missing paragraph indentations. These are all noted in the comments of the reviewed manuscript.
Response 3: Regarding excessive verbiage, we rewrote in a more succinct manner, the introduction and conclusion. We also made sure to comment all acronyms. We improved the readability and consistency of the tables. Finally, indentation has been revised.
Best regards
Reviewer 5 Report
General comments:
The manuscript confirms the essence of the taxonomy developed in 2020, based on 2,475 adaptive solutions recorded in 2022 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and discusses the differences observed. In terms of research content, the topic of the manuscript conforms to the direction of journal publication. On the whole, the manuscript is reasonably organized and well-written, and should be accepted for publication.
Special comments:
[1] Line11, Please indicate what COP-26 stands for.
[2] The Abstract of the manuscript lacks a statement of the important results or conclusions of the study.
[3] Line161, The reference (Boutang et al) need to be pointed out.
[4] Line265, In Table 1, 28,0% should be 28.0%.
[5] Line295, Please point out what T°increase stands for.
[6] Line 320, In Table1, Please indicate the meanings of different colors in the table.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for reviewing our paper on Taxonomy and ex-ante metric of climate change adaptation projects recorded in the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) as updated for COP-26.
We will take your comments into account point by point. Remarks and spelling and grammatical mistakes will be made directly in the revised version of the article.
The English level will be corrected by native English expert.
Point [1] Line11, Please indicate what COP-26 stands for.
Correction: ok (see updated article)
[2] The Abstract of the manuscript lacks a statement of the important results or conclusions of the study.
Correction has been made in the abstract.
[3] Line161, The reference (Boutang et al) need to be pointed out.
Correction: ok (see updated article)
[4] Line265, In Table 1, 28,0% should be 28.0%.
Correction: ok (see updated article)
[5] Line295, Please point out what T°increase stands for.
Correction: ok (see updated article)
[6] Line 320, In Table1, Please indicate the meanings of different colors in the table.
Correction: ok (see updated article)
Many thanks for tour close examination of our article,
Best regards
