Village Settlements’ Perspective on Rural Water Accessibility: A Mountainous Water Security Measurement Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This manuscript discusses water resource access in the mountainous areas of southwestern China from a village perspective. The results are informative for policy formulation on rural water supply in western China. The following issues require further explanation by the authors:

(1) What are the good reasons for setting the buffer zone radius at 10km? The terrain in the mountainous areas of southwest China is unusually complex, and the 10km range is already far beyond the regional extent of villages.

(2) In what way is the supply and demand of water resources (Table 3) quantified or obtained?

(3) Since a water resource utilisation model has been proposed, it is necessary to verify the performance of the model directly or indirectly using some real data.

(4) The spatial heterogeneity of natural environmental factors affecting rural people's access to water resources should be further added.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript undertakes a very keen research regarding an important aspect for mountainous VSs.

The Chapter Introduction is very well organized and conceived including relevant figure, highlighting in the same time the assessment of water security in rural mountainous rural areas. We are introduced to the chapter of Methods, with a very good structure, graphs, tables and figures, to a serious of  research methods, that enables us to have a complete analysis and data, pointing out crucial aspects of LCP model, the water demand, water availability and rural water accessibility.

The chapter Results are very well defined, its outcomes, in term of calculations, tables being relevant for research topic.

The Conclusion Chapter should be more developed, because the previous 2 chapters provide enough data to reached out to more extended and comprehensive conclusions.

For this kind of research, I recommend more current References to be added.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Village settlements' perspective on rural water accessibility: A mountainous water security measurement approach

The material is, rather, a sequence from a contract made with the authorities in an area, rather than a Q2 scientific article that can be classified as a novelty. They are calculations, made using established methods and using statistical and spatial data from the study area, available to the authors. In addition, the authors do not seem to know or have not worked with the most important ways of expressing the surface water resource, as well as underground: average specific runoff, average drained layer, runoff coefficient, etc., whose thematic maps allow identifying immediately available water resource. In a spatial analysis, by subtracting the water requirement grid from that of the annual average water availability, you get the zoning of the surplus and deficit available to the population.
The work is poor in international bibliography, which would allow a complex development of the subject on specific and highly current indicators.
The detailed purpose of the paper is not clearly stated, neither in the abstract nor at the end of the Introduction chapter.
Also, pinning the chosen subject to the mountain area is a strange thing, since usually the mountain areas are the ones where the hydrospheric fluid drain is formed and the richest in this resource. I don't know if a mountainous area, especially in the temperate zone, can have security problems related to the water resource. In the field of water supplies, the main problem is whether there is a quantitative and qualitative water resource and how accessible it is and to what buffer in the contiguity. The rest are interpretations and matters of detail.
A technical issue with the article is the level of detail/visibility from some images and some tables. This needs to be fixed.
Also, the working spatial resolution seems to be weak, or even unspecified, according to table 1, although the study area is not very extensive.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript has been revised with reference to the revisions and I am satisfied with it.