Connecting Water Access with Multidimensional Poverty: The Case of Tupiza River Basin in Bolivia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have several comments and suggestions as shown in the attached file.  It would be a good idea for the authors to respond to my comments before the paper is accepted for publication.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. They were very useful to improve our paper. Please find the attached revised manuscript that includes our edits based on your suggestions and reviewer 2 suggestions. 

Please, let us know if the corrections are clear and if they meet your comments. If you have further comments or suggestions to improve the manuscript, we would be glad to work on them.

A point-by-point response to your main comments is below:

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Point 1: General Comment about the grammar. At many places, the write can be improved grammatically, however, I have not made those comments due to time constraints at my end.  If possible, the paper should be reviewed and revised for this purpose. 

Response 1: We reviewed the entire paper for more grammar improvements.

Point 2: It would be helpful to list the variables associated with water access that were chosen in the city of Tupiza, and how they were quantified.  

Response 2: We could not estimate a water index for the city of Tupiza. We explained the reason after Table 7.

Point 3: Is 1 missing at the end of all 0? (related to Tables 8 and 9)

Response 3: The value is 0. We included the four decimals the statistic program gives us as in the other values. We added an additional decimal in the word version.

Point 4: Are these actual results after implementing policies, or simulated/predicted changes?  If the results are after the implementing policies then how were the effects of each policy separated?  If the results are based on model simulation then how were the predicted changes calculated? Both Tables 10 and 11 need to address this issue so that readers are clear about the actual versus simulated results.

Response 4: Those are predicted changes based on the econometrical results and hypothetical changes in observed variables. We explained that by adding some paragraphs and also made some corrections to tables 10 and 11.

Best regards,

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The Tupiza river basin shows signs of contamination that affect the quality of the 101
water that flows through the main river and eventually ends up being consumed by the 102
local population. The presence of heavy metals was evidenced naturally and also by min- 103
ing activity which, added to erosive effects, causes these elements to be transported in 104
soil, water and air [18, 22]. The dynamic between heavy metals and fine sediments would 105
indicate that areas of degradation of the Tupiza river and the cloudy water that transports 106
them are those with the greatest risk and exposure

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. They were very useful to improve our paper. Please find the attached revised manuscript that includes our edits based on your suggestions and reviewer 1 suggestions. 

Please, let us know if the corrections are clear and if they meet your comments. If you have further comments or suggestions to improve the manuscript, we would be glad to work on them.

A point-by-point response to your comments is below:

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Point 1: Authors say that the study focuses on understanding the links between water access and poverty in the Tupiza river basin, located southeast of the Department of Potosí, in Bolivia, which is considered one of the 25 strategic basins in the country due to its socio-economic relevance and environmental vulnerability. However, there is no other study to compare the results drawn from that research. It would have been helpful to introduce other studies which dealt with similar cases to compare just from the beginning the framework of this research.

Response 1: Since we did not find some other studies to compare our research´s results with, what would be your suggestion in order to address your comment? We think we can include a couple of paragraphs related to other studies in Bolivia that analyzed poverty and water connections (not necessary with the same methodology). Another option could be including some comments about other studies that used a similar methodology but in different countries but to the best of our knowledge, the Shapley-Owen method was not used to analyse water and poverty linkages, so far.   

Point 2: Even though authors show that Tupiza river basin provides signs of contamination that affect the quality of the water nothing is said about the environmental technics to extract the mineral. However, nothing is said about new environmental technologies applied to the current mining activities in all over the world.

Response 2: Although we did not go deep into mining-water problems in Tupiza River Basin, we think it can be useful to mention the need of exploring new environmental technologies for the mining activity in the area and its potential effect on water quality, which also has to be studied carefully. We included some sentences in the abstract and a small paragraph in section 2.

Point 3: The survey is really well explained, although limitations to collect data should be also more extensively explained. Specially among those underdeveloped territories. What kind of incentives the sample have had to answer the questionnaire? And how they were organized to get all the data? 

Response 3: We added a paragraph related to the survey limitations in section 3.1.

Best regards,

Author Response File: Author Response.docx