Next Article in Journal
Influence of Land Use Change on Hydrological Cycle: Application of SWAT to Su-Mi-Huai Area in Beijing, China
Next Article in Special Issue
Combined Application of Real-Time Control and Green Technologies to Urban Drainage Systems
Previous Article in Journal
Removal of Molybdenum(VI) from Raw Water Using Nano Zero-Valent Iron Supported on Activated Carbon
Previous Article in Special Issue
Assessing the Effectiveness of Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS): Interventions, Impacts and Challenges
 
 
Review
Peer-Review Record

A Review of Roof and Pond Rainwater Harvesting Systems for Water Security: The Design, Performance and Way Forward

Water 2020, 12(11), 3163; https://doi.org/10.3390/w12113163
by Husnna Aishah Zabidi 1, Hui Weng Goh 1,*, Chun Kiat Chang 1, Ngai Weng Chan 2 and Nor Azazi Zakaria 1
Reviewer 1: Anonymous
Reviewer 2: Anonymous
Reviewer 3: Anonymous
Water 2020, 12(11), 3163; https://doi.org/10.3390/w12113163
Submission received: 22 September 2020 / Revised: 30 October 2020 / Accepted: 9 November 2020 / Published: 12 November 2020

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The purpose of this paper is not at all clear, beyond providing an output from a lot of reading. It has no particular message beyond that Rainwater Harvesting is widely practised and comes in many forms. About 100 papers are reviewed, but entirely without any judgement of their quality or attempt to put their findings on any common scale.

Noticeable absent is any attempt to limit the meaning of Rainwater Harvesting to distinguish from water use and management in general. (For example they might have chosen "capture of rainfall for use within say 100m m of where it falls" or "water systems that include storage in man-made structures").

The authors have set themselves the task of 'reviewing', 'highlighting' and 'suggesting a way forward'. The first and last imply a critique which the paper hardly supplies. Uncritical 'highlighting' is a rather arbitrary selection process that doesn't make for any coherent take-away message: it is rarely the basis for a useful communication.  

The topic is not novel - RWH practice has been documented thousands (yes) of times over recent decades. The technique is well known, so a tutorial on its basics is hardly needed. Somewhat contentious issues - like which of rival techniques to use to relate performance to parameters such as climate, collection area and buffer volume - are not addressed.

The subject of recently quite popular Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) is only lightly covered. However the benefits of realisable runoff buffering in reducing serious urban flash flooding is correctly declared to be only marginal.

The paper has little distinctive to say about pond-fed irrigation or about domestic roofwater harvesting. The innovation of dual-quality supplies is mentioned but not appraised. The coverage of water quality is almost missleading; the means of achieving acceptable biological quality are well tried and heavy metal contamination is rare. Even iron-contamination is mentioned as a problem whereas a major driver of RWH has been its low level of mineralisation compared with groundwater.

The authors have listed and read about 100 papers covering a wide range of meteorological and economic circumstances and for some readers this literature search/list may be useful. It is barely possible to assess the accuracy of the extensive data reproduced, though a couple of figures seem immediately suspect (surely nowhere in Bangladesh has a rainfall as low as the figure quoted) - the authors have presumably not seen it their job to assess their sources.

The economic analysis, although it fails to note the much lower value (per m3) of irrigation water cf household water, does come up with  mini-conclusion - namely that RWH is viable only where water tariffs are above (say) $0.5 per m3. The following section mentions techniques (including subsidies) for promoting RWH usage. However it makes little case for such promotion being desirable on sustainability on environmental grounds. The RWH community has wrestled with this issue for many years. 

If asked, I would find it hard to recommend a more useful output from the numerous authors. Perhaps they could find a proposition they could both explore and then develop an interesting proposition or make a persuasive recommendation. Testing what they have read against the particular needs and circumstances of Malaysia could have been interesting for Asian readers..  

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments.

It was your valuable and insightful comments that led to possible improvements in the current version. We have carefully considered the comments and tried our best to address every one of them. We look forward to your further feedback on what you are looking for in the paper in more specific way. We hope the manuscript after careful revisions meet your high standards. We welcome further constructive comments if any.

We provide the point-by-point responses in the attached file. All modifications in the manuscript have been highlighted in red.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The presented paper is interesting and although it not presents an experimental work, it is a review paper well organized that deserves publication. Some parts of the paper are too basic, however it may be read by readers that are out of the area of knowledge and so it can be justified.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments.

It was your valuable and insightful comments that led to possible improvements in the current version. We have carefully considered the comments and tried our best to address every one of them. We look forward to your further feedback on what you are looking for in the paper in more specific way. We hope the manuscript after careful revisions meet your high standards. We welcome further constructive comments if any.

We provide the point-by-point responses in the attached file. All modifications in the manuscript have been highlighted in red.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript "A Review of Roof and Pond Rainwater Harvesting System: The Design, Performance and Way Forward" is an interesting reviewer paper on sustainable solutions as the rainwater harvesting system. It is in line with the aim of the journal. The manuscript is well written and organized. Few suggestions are below reported necessary to increase the quality of the manuscript, that if addressed by authors can make the manuscript acceptable for publication.

Although a lot of studies were published in the last two years (2019-2020), here only few were cited. Therefore, the authors should update the list of the references with more recently studies, as the following:  

  • Alim, M. A., Rahman, A., Tao, Z., Samali, B., Khan, M. M., & Shirin, S. (2020). Feasibility analysis of a small-scale rainwater harvesting system for drinking water production at Werrington, New South Wales, Australia. Journal of Cleaner Production, 122437.
  • Kuntz Maykot, J., & Ghisi, E. (2020). Assessment of A Rainwater Harvesting System in A Multi-Storey Residential Building in Brazil. Water, 12(2), 546.
  • Słyś, D., & Stec, A. (2020). Centralized or Decentralized Rainwater Harvesting Systems: A Case Study. Resources, 9(1), 5.
  • Palermo S.A., Talarico V.C., Pirouz B. (2020) Optimizing Rainwater Harvesting Systems for Non-potable Water Uses and Surface Runoff Mitigation. In: Sergeyev Y., Kvasov D. (eds) Numerical Computations: Theory and Algorithms. NUMTA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11973. Springer, Cham.
  • Lasya, B., Bhavana, Y., Deekshitha, B., & Priya, B. K. (2020, August). An Innovative and Effective Electronic Based Automatic Rainwater Harvesting System. In 2020 Third International Conference on Smart Systems and Inventive Technology (ICSSIT) (pp. 114-121). IEEE.
  • Lin, C. C., Liou, K. Y., Lee, M., & Chiueh, P. T. (2019). Impacts of urban water consumption under climate change: An adaptation measure of rainwater harvesting system. Journal of Hydrology, 572, 160-168.
  • Oberascher M., Zischg J., Palermo S.A., Kinzel C., Rauch W., Sitzenfrei R. (2019) Smart Rain Barrels: Advanced LID Management Through Measurement and Control. In: Mannina G. (eds) New Trends in Urban Drainage Modelling. UDM 2018. Green Energy and Technology. Springer, Cham.
  • Freni, G., & Liuzzo, L. (2019). Effectiveness of rainwater harvesting systems for flood reduction in residential urban areas. Water, 11(7), 1389.
  • Ibrahim, G. R. F., Rasul, A., Ali Hamid, A., Ali, Z. F., & Dewana, A. A. (2019). Suitable site selection for rainwater harvesting and storage case study using Dohuk Governorate. Water, 11(4), 864.

The authors could also add some consideration about future directions on the use of this technology, as the smart optimization of these systems, and discuss about possible limitations.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments.

It was your valuable and insightful comments that led to possible improvements in the current version. We have carefully considered the comments and tried our best to address every one of them. We look forward to your further feedback on what you are looking for in the paper in more specific way. We hope the manuscript after careful revisions meet your high standards. We welcome further constructive comments if any.

We provide the point-by-point responses in the attached file. All modifications in the manuscript have been highlighted in red.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper has been improved by a clarification of its purpose and some necessary focus on a more specific scenario (tropical Asia). It is however a much longer document than before and i doubt that many potential readers will find its content sufficiently persuasive to justify persisting reading to the end of it. The (lengthy) introduction sets out the objective of demonstrating that rainwater harvesting in general, and 'pondwater' runoff storage in particular, have unrealised potential to provide water and to limit (urban) storm runoff flooding. The rest of the paper responds to this assertion, but not very convincingly, as it hardly addresses the reason who take up of SUDS and roofwater harvesting has been so limited.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have addressed the comments of the previous reviewer round and improved the quality of the manuscript that is now acceptable for publication in Water. 

 

Back to TopTop