The Design of the Payments for Water-Related Ecosystem Services: What Should the Ideal Payment in Slovakia Look Like?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This interesting article is the Slovak off-spin of the results of a cross-country study (online survey) in the context of a COST Action on water-related payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. While the overall design and implementation of the study and also of this national part is appropriate and an interesting read, there are some issues that would require attention before the manuscript can be published.

First, although the language is more or less adequate I did have some problems to really capture the meaning and content of quite a few sentences. In many cases, I had to assume a certain meaning. I would strongly recommend editing by a professional English language editor.

Second, it is somehow claimed that the stakeholders were answering the questions with having an 'ideal PWS' in mind, and were not referring to existing schemes in Slovakia or elsewhere. Some related schemes are mentioned by the authors (like water-related Agri-Environmental Schemes, etc.) but it remains unclear to what extent they are different or if stakeholders were having the experiences with those existing schemes in mind when answering the questions.

Third, the authors mention additional interviews - did this include all 15 online respondents from Slovakia (if so, the response was probably not anonymous). Or were there at least overlaps between online respondents and interviewed stakeholders? Further, it is often difficult to see in the text when insights from these interviews is presented, and when the online survey or other sources are referred to.

Fourth, no information is provided on the 'composition' of the online respondents (there is at least a broad categorisation of respondents in the presentation of the overall results in (32). Could this be done for Slovak, too? This would be helpful to assess the trends in the answers and could also help understand some of the 'only' moderate importances. Further, it would be useful to have some information on how the addressees of the online survey were selected (in particular in the Slovak case).

Fifth, there are sometimes references to specific regional Slovak cases and even some regional stakeholders. How does this relate to the national perspective of the study? Were these names mentioned in the interviews or as examples in the online survey?

Sixth, coming back to an earlier issue: some relation to the current PWS system in Slovakia in the discussion would be useful: is the relative importance assigned by the respondents of the survey already reflected in the form/shape of existing PWS; or are they differing substantially. And if the latter, why? Table 8 suggests that these would be existing 'PWS schemes in Slovakia', but then it is a mix of status quo (e.g., SIBYLA) and future/ideal situations (e.g., fishing associations should be consulted when designing the schemes). This is highly confusing.

There are also more edit mistakes, yet, I did not present them here since, in my opinion, a non-marginal revision of the paper and language editing is needed anyway. Yet, the results and insights per se are interesting and relevant, so I strongly recommend resubmission.

Author Response

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The conceptual discussion should be more in-depth and with more international bibliographic references making the comparison with another Studies in central Europe

It importante to establish some comparison with the other countries of the Cross-European study

The conclusions   should be improved in order to present the main results in an integrated manner and based on Esvoláquia's forestry policies and should point some Future research lines.

Author Response

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This is in general a well-written paper with good readability.  Though specific to Slovakia, the framework and approaches provide a nice example that is broadly transferable to other ecosystems and locations.  My biggest issue is that it is difficult to ascertain whether the analysis (based on a survey of 15 people and document review) is robust enough to make the final recommendations of a PES framework. For example, to what degree did the top 3 ranked WES depend on the participants of the survey?  Would a different selection of participants have resulted in different results? Futhermore, there were aspects of the methodology that were difficult to follow or seemed inconsistent and could be clarified. Specific comments below.

ABSTRACT

Line 29 – This sentence is awkward.  I think replacing the comma with a semi-colon and replacing “; market-based solution as payments..” with “market-based solution of payments…”

Line 31 – awkward phrasing “is to design of such as payment in Slovakia”.  Please rephrase.

Line 33 – I think just “forestry” rather than “the forestry”

Line 45 – beginning with “Particularly, …”.  This is not a complete sentence. Please rewrite.

Line 66 – “WDF” should be “WFD”

Line 69 – Sentence is awkardly worded; think perhaps “that target” rather than “that targets” and not sure what the “of” in “of river basins” is referring to

Line 74 – I think “, for which” instead of “, which”

Line 79 – runon sentence;  replace comma with semi-colon

Lines 85-89 – This discussion on additionality is difficult to follow;  “additionality of the intervention” and “that cause the WES supply” are awkwardly worded, and additionality is not clearly defined;  I think instead of saying “is referred as”, perhaps saying “is defined as”, but whole section should be rewritten to be more clear.  The concept as explained in the results (“changes in management activities induced by the program compared to traditional management activities”) is easier to follow

Lines 119-121 – I had a hard time following which aspects of the results were pulled from the document analysis vs. the qualitative interviews vs. the published Balikova survey.  I think breaking it down further here to explain which methods were used for which purpose could help.

Lines 123-146 – The steps in this section are not consistent with Figure 1.  The first step (Line 124) isn’t to identify seller and buyers, it is to identify the subject (Lines 132-136).  Sellers and buyers is the second step.     The 4^th step of data collection is explained (Lines 143-146), but I’m not seeing where the 5^th step (environmental sustainability) is explained.  Suggest reorganizing this section to be more directly consistent with Figure 1.

Line 124 – “serve us as a basement” I think should be “serve as a foundation”

Line 154-155 – “the results from a European study were used” – I was confused on exactly what was done here.  This was an existing completed study, and you just extracted the results specific to Slovakia?  I think some additional clarification, background, and details on the existing survey are needed. How did the authors justify that the methodology of this existing survey was appropriate for what they were trying to do? Were the types of participants, questions, sample size, etc. in this existing survey appropriate for the authors’ goals?  In other words, would a different set of participants or larger sample size have led to  different results? Were all stakeholder groups represented?  Were the participants familiar with the jargon used in the surveys (e.g., would they know the difference between collaboration vs. co-decision, would they know they difference between a system that emphasizes “shared values” vs. “bunding of services”)

Line 162 – “the sample size was limited by the number…”   What was the final sample size?

Table 2 – Some of the question wording here is awkard. Suggest Q2 “What should the role of the public authorities be in PWS schemes?”, Q3 – “…how should stakeholders (..) be involved in the decision-making process…”

Table 2 – If these questions are from the Balikova reference, it should be cited in the Table legend.

Line 177 – need to add a (3) for the third ranked

Table 3, Figure 2, Figure 3, Table 6, Table 7 – It would be clearer if the results could be tied back to the questions in Table 2. This could either be done directly in the Table or Figure legend (e.g., Question 1: The level…), or just narratively described in the text.  Because Tables 4 and 5 interrupt the survey results, it comes across as jumping around, and more directly linking it to the Table 2 survey questions would help.  

Table 4 – It is not clear what the columns labelled % are or what the * ** are referring to.  Also not clear why some rows are in bold. There is also a footnote 1, but I am not seeing where this is referenced in the table.

Lines 201-214 – This whole section seemed out of place to me, because you are initially discussing the survey restuls then jump to a discussion of main actors, and it was not clear to me where this came from or how it related to Question 3 in the survey. The presentation seems out of order to me -   If this is the correct order (because it follows the steps in Figure 1), Okay, but the authors need to make clearer their process, particularly the relationship between survey question 3 and the development of the actors list, and at what steps doc analysis was used vs. the existing survey vs. a new survey.

Line 201 – “identified main stakeholder groups” – why were there only three identified?  From the survey Q3, farmers and tourism and others were also identified as stakeholders; why were they not included here?

Line 204 – There is mentioned here an “online questionnaire”.  Is this different than the survey in Table 2?  How was this survey conducted? What were the questions? More details needed here please.  And were the results of the Table 2 survey, Question 3 used to identify the stakeholder groups for the follow-up survey?  Are the 15 here the same as the 15 in the other survey?

Line 219 –“The respondents” is confusing as to whether you are referring to the respondants of the Table 2 survey, or to the ‘online questionnaire’ mentioned in the prior section.  Did both surveys have 15 respondents?

Line 219- “mainly on the demand side.. and at the same time” – not sure why it is said “mainly on the demand side” as the survey option with the highest score was the Mixed option.

Line 222 – Why is this “surprising”?

Line 224 – Comma after PWS schemes; also, it doesn’t seem correct to say the public prefers the demand side and mixed.  The demand side barely performs better than regulation.  I think the only conclusion is that the public generally preferred involvement of public authority, but varied in what role for involvement (versus nothing).

Line 233 – here it is stated that both forest owners and farmers are most important;  I am confused then why farmers were not considered as actors in Section 3.2 (Table 5), or some of the other stakeholder groups for that matter.  I am not understanding how the identification of important stakeholders in Figure 3 was translated into identification of Actors in Table 5.

Line 241 – Why is this surprising?

Line 241 – instead of “any considered implementation…” I think you mean “no considered implementation…”

Line 244 – I don’t think you can speculate about why shared values and/or bundling scored lower, particularly to infer it is due to lack of knowledge.  In fact, shared values only scored marginally lower than multi-level governance so I’m not even sure a number of 3.9 vs. 3.8 is ‘signficant’.  There could be many factors that influence how they are scored by the survey participants – they genuinely did not like that option, they picked options where the wording tended to sound “positive” vs “negative”, they tend to pick the options in the order of which they are listed, etc.  I wouldn’t speculate unless you have some evidence to back it up.  The answer options as written are fairly complicated, and I find myself struggling to discern what the differences between them really mean in practice – so I could see a survey participant having similar issues;

Line 257 – define the acronymns for SIBYLA and SILVA

Line 259 – “results of growth simulator… can be directly used as indicators of WES”?   I am not seeing how indicators of forest production, biomass, yield etcetera can be used as indicators of the WES in Table 1  (groundwater recharge, clean water, soil erosion, genetic diversity, etc.).  They seem like the wrong indicators.  If you are generally using ‘forest production’ as a proxy for all WES, I guess ok, but it would only allow you to make broad generalizations about WES going up or down, certainly wouldn’t allow you to assess more nuanced changes in and among WES like shared values, co-benefits, or tradeoffs.

Line 265 – “be prepared to agree to a long-term contract”

Line 270 – Why is this surprising?

Line 272 – “importance of additionality” – I think the description of additionality here is easier to follow then the one on Lines 85-89.  Suggest being clearer and more consistent in how this is explained.

Line 274; Replace comma with semi-colon

Line 274 – “additionality relates to changes in provision of the WES supply”…  This seems different than the previous explanation of additionality.  Does “additionality” mean there are additional management actions are taken, or that there are measurable improvements in WES?   In other words, there could be an increase in the number or type of implemented management actions that don’t necessarily have a substantive improvement on WES.  Alternatively, there could be improvements in WES over time due to the ‘status quo’ that aren’t necessarily tied to additional management actions due to PES (as described in Q5, answer 2).  Q5 answer 2 seems to me focused only on a change in management activities – it is a different question as to whether or not these additional activities actually have a substantive improvement on WES.  Q5 answer 3 seems to me more about seeing a substantive improvement in WES, but is confined to outside the contracted areas.  So the option of seeing an improvement in WES on contracted lands seems to be missing as an answer option. Please be clear and consistent in what is meant by this concept.

Lines 280-281 – I am not understanding how the SIBYLA output (index of stand growth and wood composition) are reasonable indicators of water quality and water quantity, or how the other WES listed in Table 2 would be measured.  The authors mention the importance of choosing the right indicator, but these just seem like a mis-match.  Furthermore, the preferred option (Q5, answer 2) is related to measureable changes in management activities, not measurable changes in WES.  These may seem linked, but you could potentially have improvements in WES due to status quo (non-PES activities). I don’t see how an indicator like stand growth or total value could help you a) ascertain that there were direct changes in management activities induced by the PES, or b) distinguish improvements and trade-offs between WES.

Line 299 – “direct changes in management actions, which are intended to increase level of provision of WES (principle of additionality)”;  Again please clarify what is meant by additionality and be consistent. This seems subtly different than the answer in Q5 Answer 2, which focused only on a change in management activities.  It seems to me important to tease these things apart – did the PES lead to a change in behavior, did the change in behavior lead to substantive improvements in WES, to what degree are WES improving under status quo non-PES activities vs. the PWS, etc.

Table 8 – The order of these steps is different than Figure 1, where the “subject” was Step 1.

Line 337 – I think you may be overemphasizing the difference between the options – shared values didn’t score that much lower than multi-scale governance.  Wouldn’t both a 3.93 and a 3.8 be considered “moderate” since neither is greater than 4?  Also, given the variability in responses, it’s hard to gauge whether these differences are even ‘significant’. 

Line 346 – drop ‘the thing is’ – “On the other hand, Slovakia has a long way to go…”

Line 359 – “important to define qualitative and quantitative indicators that reflect the benefits of environmental schemes, whereas in practice, the main indicators of water quality and quantity have been evaluated in Slovakia”   I don’t understand this sentence or what point is being made; 

Line 385 – Please cite or provide website for TestPESLes

Author Response

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have carefully read the revised manuscript and the responses of the authors to the remarks of the other two reviewers and myself. I find that the manuscript has increased substantially in terms of clarity and - by and large - also in terms of language. One of my main concerns, that survey respondents in Slovakia might not relate their answers to a future and ideal PWS in Slovakia, but instead reflect on an existing scheme was mitigated: it seems that there has been no PWS or a similar scheme targeting water-related ecosystem services implemented in Slovakia (which is a bit surprising since - to my knowledge - there are also agri-environmental schemes (AES) in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU implemented in Slovakia, and those AES are typically quite similar to PES, yet with a fixed set of buyers and sellers). 

Apart from this, I do not see any obstacles that would prevent publishing this manuscript in Water. However, I would encourage a final careful editing process since there are still a few minor mistakes (e.g., line 213: "These stakeholders...represent").

Author Response

We agree about the existence of similar economic instruments related to support of ecosystem services, that are knotted on high level of regulation, on the other hand, we can conclude that the “core” PWS and PES schemes characterized with voluntariness are still missing in Slovakia. Furthermore, the AES are implemented on agricultural land and with aim to promote greater activities (e.g. educational activities of farmers) and ecosystem services (such as biodiverzity). In addition, we double-checked the manuscript and corrected some mistakes highlighted as revision.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors incorporated the suggested changes into the text. 

Author Response

Thanks you very much.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

All my comments have been adequately addressed.  One minor thing, two columns both labelled "%"  in what is now labelled Table 5.  Maybe label "Relative %" and "Actual %", or similar. Also, still don't understand why some of these rows are bold, or whether that's just an artifact of my pdf quality.

Author Response

In accordance with the Reviewer’s comment, we re-checked Table 5 (and also the other tables) in order to correct typos and inaccuracies. To facilitate this check we have accepted the revisions of round1 and left only the new revisions visible. In Table 5, the first column (%) show the percentage referred to the primary function, while the second column (%) show the percentage referred to the forest categories. However, in order not to create confusion we deleted the column with the percentages referred to the primary function.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx