Social Practices for Climate Mitigation: A Big Data Analysis of Russia’s Environmental Online Communities

Reviewer 1

Author's Reply to the Review Report

Thank you for the opportunity to get acquainted with your manuscript, despite various relevant issues, I want to present some critical points.
1.The abstract provides relevant information, but perhaps it is necessary to refrain from numbers, because the abstract should attract a potential reader, not push them away. 

2.The introduction provides information about climate change, but there is absolutely no information about climate/environmental protection e-communication. Therefore, strengthening this aspect would be important, I recommend for inspiration: Burksiene, V.; Dvorak, J. E-Communication of ENGO’s for Measurable Improvements for Sustainability. Adm. Sci. 2022, 12, 70. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci12020070
3.Theoretical framework must be rewritten in principle and in order to analyze communication on social networks about climate change and environmental protection. There is a lot of information. It is necessary to present how other countries deal with climate change, e.g. Kotseva-Tikova, M., & Dvorak, J. (2022). Climate policy and plans for recovery in Bulgaria and Lithuania. Romanian journal of European affairs, 22(2).
Аня 4.Next you need to create a section on the context and then present the situation in Russia, you need to describe the Vkontakte network why it was chosen, because here an international journal and researchers from other countries cannot really know what is happening there in Russia. 

Аня 5.It is not very clear how the 110 topics were reached, maybe you can provide a picture of how the selection was carried out. 

6.The conclusions lack policy implications.

We express our sincere gratitude for your invaluable recommendations, which have significantly enhanced the quality of our manuscript. The revised sections have been highlighted in yellow for your convenience. Below are our point-by-point responses to the specific comments raised in your review.

1. We thank the reviewer for this suggestion. We have considered it carefully and decided to retain the specific numbers (190,000 posts, 103 communities, 80 practices) in the abstract as they are crucial for demonstrating the study's methodological scale and empirical substantiation, which we believe are key factors for attracting our target readership.

2. We thank the reviewer for this insightful comment and for suggesting the relevant reference. In response, we have refined the introduction (lines 42-43) to better articulate its logical flow. Our introduction is structured to first establish the substantive problem (the critical role of transforming social practices for climate mitigation) and then identify the research context where these practices can be observed (online communities). The primary focus of our study is not on the general patterns of e-communication per se, but rather on using the content of online communities as a data source to systematically identify the specific social practices being discussed. Thus, the introduction logically moves from:

The importance of social practices for climate policy.

The role of online platforms as arenas where these practices are visible.

The identified research gap: a lack of systematic analysis of these practices in the Russian context.

This framing allows us to position our study firmly within the theoretical framework of social practice theory and big data analysis, which are its core contributions.

3. We sincerely thank the reviewer for this thoughtful comment and for suggesting the interesting reference on comparative climate policy, which we have reviewed. We agree that understanding different national contexts is valuable. However, the primary goal of our theoretical framework is not to provide a comparative analysis of national climate policies, but to establish a robust conceptual foundation for analyzing the content of social practices discussed in online communities.

Our framework is deliberately structured to:

Introduce social practice theory as our core analytical lens, as it is uniquely suited to deciphering the "what, how, and why" of everyday environmental actions promoted online.

Justify why this theory is superior to individual-behavioral models for understanding the systemic nature of the practices we are studying.

Bridge the theory with our methodological choice by explaining how online communities are a key site for the formation and dissemination of these practices, especially in contexts like Russia with limited formal participation channels.

We believe that shifting the framework's focus to a comparative policy analysis would divert attention from the core theoretical and methodological contributions of our work, which are centered on adapting social practice theory for big data analysis. The suggested reference, while excellent in its own right, falls outside the specific theoretical scope we are building.

4. We added the corresponding information in the introduction (lines 123-135). VKontakte was chosen for this study because it is the most popular and officially recognized social network in Russia, widely used by both individuals and governmental organizations.

5. We appreciate your comment and agree that the process of determining the final number of topics should be clarified. In the initial stage, we experimented with various clustering parameters using the BERTopic algorithm, comparing K-means (with 75, 100, and 125 clusters) and HDBSCAN (with minimum cluster sizes of 100, 150, and 200). The number of topics produced by these configurations ranged from 31 to 184.

To select the optimal model, we evaluated topic coherence and topic diversity metrics. The highest coherence (0.81) was achieved using HDBSCAN with a minimum cluster size of 150 and the paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 embedding model. This configuration yielded 110 topics, which were subsequently used for expert interpretation. To improve transparency, we added a figure (Figure 2) illustrating the parameter selection process and the corresponding number of topics at each step.

6. We have changed part of the Conclusion section so that the recommendations are framed as suggestions for policymakers (lines 560-578).

Reviewer 2

Author's Reply to the Review Report

The following comments are necessary to improve the quality of the manuscript.

1.Write explicit research questions and hypotheses early in the last paragraph of introduction.

2.Clarify novelty strongly: explicitly say what is new compared with prior work (methodological scaling, Russia-specific findings, BERTopic + expert pipeline, policy translation). Make it a single paragraph in the Introduction.

3.Improve the global-to-local framing: briefly summarize how findings from Russia compare to key international studies (similarities/differences) and why the Russian case contributes to global literature on digital activism and practice theory.

4. what exact policy or knowledge gap does this fill in Russia—insufficient citizen participation, lack of monitoring, or poor translation of bottom-up practices into policy?

Аня 5.Expand justification for choosing VKontakte—why this platform is representative of Russian environmental discourse (user demographics, reach) and limitations versus other platforms (Telegram, Facebook, Instagram).

6. Explain why 103 communities were selected within the population of all relevant communities—what proportion do they represent? Were there notable exclusions?

7. Add a short contributions list in the Introduction (3–5 bullets) that maps contributions to theory, method, empirical knowledge, and policy.

8. Strengthen critical engagement with prior literature: more explicitly compare social-practice approaches and digital activism studies to show theoretical tensions and complementarities.

9. Justify why social practice theory is best suited for this study.

Аня 10. Provide more references (recent 3–5 years) on automated identification of social practices and explain how your approach advances them.

Аня 11. Provide a data period (start and end dates) and explain why that temporal window was chosen. If multiple years, indicate how events (e.g., policy changes) could affect findings.

Аня 12. Describe inclusion/exclusion criteria in more detail (how communities were identified on Ecowiki.ru; were closed or moderated groups included?).

Аня 13. Justify the choice of the embedding model

Аня 14. Explain the comparison of models (e.g., 110 topics vs other topic counts) and why 110 was optimal.

15. Explain how you mapped topics to social practices—is a topic always a single practice or can topics map to multiple practices? Provide algorithmic rules

16. Provide temporal patterns if available (week/month trends) or clearly state absence of temporal analysis and why.

17. Do you think Table 1 is enough to justify the results section to be considered as a publication in any journal?

18. Avoid overgeneralization in discussion.

19. Conclusions are too lengthy.

20. In conclusions: Add an ethics statement: describe how user privacy was protected (anonymization), whether public posts were used only, and any permissions/terms-of-service compliance.

21. Also, provide clearer future research directions.

We express our sincere gratitude for your invaluable recommendations, which have significantly enhanced the quality of our manuscript. The revised sections have been highlighted in yellow for your convenience. Below are our point-by-point responses to the specific comments raised in your review.

1. We added hypotheses that were formulated not as strict predictions, but as reasonable expectations arising from theory and previous research (lines 83-94).

2. Done (lines 98-110; 507-519)

3. Done (lines 443-454; 529-533)

4. Done (lines 529-533)

5. We have expanded the justification for selecting VKontakte as the main data source in the revised manuscript (Introduction).

6. We've moved the criteria for identifying the 103 communities to the top of the Methods section (lines 243-251). Unfortunately, we didn't immediately recalculate the total number of communities. This is currently impossible, as new communities are constantly being registered and added to the list. However, we welcome your valuable feedback for future research.

7. Done (lines 111-121)

8. We thank the reviewer for this insightful suggestion. We agree that explicitly articulating the relationship between social practice theory and digital activism studies strengthens our theoretical framework. In response, we have integrated a concise discussion that highlights both the tensions and complementarities between these approaches, particularly in the paragraph that bridges our core theory with the context of online communities (lines 52-63).

9. Done (lines 69-71)

10. We have added the following references: [60-65]

11. We have clarified the data period (2007-2024) and explained the rationale for this temporal window. It covers the full evolution of Russian environmental discourse on VKontakte, including key policy milestones such as the National Project “Ecology” (2018) and the waste management reform (2019), which likely shaped public discussions. Posts from 2025 were excluded to ensure data completeness and comparability across years (Subsection 3.1).

12. We have expanded the description of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Communities were identified via the open directory of registered environmental organizations on Ecowiki.ru. Only public VKontakte pages with at least 5,000 followers and a clear environmental focus were included (Subsection 3.1).

13.         In this study, we tested four variants of the embedding model. The final model was selected based on the evaluation metrics used. The corresponding explanations have been added to the text (Subsection 3.2).

14. The corresponding explanation is added in 3.2.

15. We described the process of defining social practices in lines 325-336.

16. This article did not analyze the data dynamics. However, we will certainly do so in future studies.

17. We have supplemented the article with two more figures to better present the methods and results.

18. We have made changes to the discussion based on the reviewers' recommendations.

19. We tried to make the conclusion more concise. We also had to take into account suggestions from other reviewers, so we were unable to reduce the conclusion to two paragraphs.

20. Done (lines 315-322)

21. Done (lines 578-587)

Reviewer 3

Author's Reply to the Review Report

1. Please avoid citations like the one in line 51; each study has its unique scientific value. If these citations are necessary, please list all of them; check for this issue throughout the manuscript, as there are similar problems in line 127 as well.

2. There are too many paragraphs in the Introduction; please merge similar content into one paragraph.

3. In line 175, please avoid starting the paragraph with 'We,' as this does not conform to the standards of scientific writing.

4. The current format of Table 1 makes it difficult for readers to grasp useful information.

Аня 5. Chapter 3 should be split into two sections: “Method”and“Result”. In its current form, it makes it difficult for readers to find useful information.

6. The conclusion should be completed in 1-2 paragraphs and further refined.

We express our sincere gratitude for your invaluable recommendations, which have significantly enhanced the quality of our manuscript. The revised sections have been highlighted in yellow for your convenience. Below are our point-by-point responses to the specific comments raised in your review.

1. We have not reduced the number of sources cited in line 51 to show the growth of research. But we have changed the sentence in line 127 to read: Social practice theory provides a systemic perspective on behavior change [40], accounting for material-technical conditions (infrastructure) [41], encompassing collective aspects of behavior [42], and identifying ‘bottlenecks’ for transformation [43].

2. We've expanded the paragraphs in the introduction, although their number was increased in response to recommendations from other reviewers.

3. We changed the sentence to read: BERTopic [53] was utilized as the unsupervised method for topic modeling, integrating transformer-based embeddings with dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques.

4. We acknowledge that the current format, which presents 80 social practices in a compact table, may be difficult to understand quickly. We settled on this option after experimenting with figures, as we found the table to be the clearest way to present the information. We would prefer to retain this format for now.

5. For better readability, we divided Section 3 into three subsections: “Data Collection”, “Topic Modeling”,  and “Analyzing Topics”.

6. We tried to make the conclusion more concise. We also had to take into account suggestions from other reviewers, so we were unable to reduce the conclusion to two paragraphs.