Viewpoints on Cooperative Peatland Management: Expectations and Motives of Dutch Farmers

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please see attached for suggested edits/comments

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We appreciate your feedback for improving the paper. We have now made updates in the new manuscript file and give an overview of the changes in the table below.

Kind regards,

The authors of this paper

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I like this paper.  It addresses an important topic and offers some useful discussion.  However, I think that it requires a few minor revisions prior to publication.  Some of these relate to citing additional literature, some to the use of English and one to making reference to example carbon markets.

Additional literature to consider citing includes:

Buschmann, C., Röder, N., Berglund, K., Berglund, Ö., Lærke, P.E., Maddison, M., Mander, Ü., Myllys, M., Osterburg, B. and van den Akker, J.J., 2020. Perspectives on agriculturally used drained peat soils: Comparison of the socioeconomic and ecological business environments of six European regions. Land Use Policy, 90, p.104181.

Evans, C.D., Peacock, M., Baird, A.J., Artz, R.R.E., Burden, A., Callaghan, N., Chapman, P.J., Cooper, H.M., Coyle, M., Craig, E. and Cumming, A., 2021. Overriding water table control on managed peatland greenhouse gas emissions. Nature, 593(7860), pp.548-552.  

Ferré, M., Muller, A., Leifeld, J., Bader, C., Müller, M., Engel, S. and Wichmann, S., 2019. Sustainable management of cultivated peatlands in Switzerland: Insights, challenges, and opportunities. Land Use Policy, 87, p.104019.

Purola, T. and Lehtonen, H., 2021. Farm-Level Effects of Emissions Tax and Adjustable Drainage on Peatlands. Environmental Management, pp.1-15.

Reed, M.S., Kenter, J.O., Hansda, R., Martin, J., Curtis, T., Saxby, H., Mills, L., Post, J., Garrod, G., Proctor, A., Collins, O., Guy, J.A, Stewart, G., & Whittingham, M. (2020) Social barriers and opportunities to the implementation of the England Peat Strategy. Final Report to Natural England and Defra, Newcastle University.

Weideveld, S.T.J., Liu, W., van den Berg, M., Lamers, L.P.M. and Fritz, C., 2021. Conventional subsoil irrigation techniques do not lower carbon emissions from drained peat meadows. Biogeosciences, 18(12), pp.3881-3902

Ziegler, R., Wichtmann, W., Abel, S., Kemp, R., Simard, M. and Joosten, H., 2021. Wet peatland utilisation for climate protection–An international survey of paludiculture innovation. Cleaner Engineering and Technology, p.100305.

Minor suggested grammatical edits include:

Line 44-46: perhaps rephrase to "...so does the intensity of emissions"

Line 52: perhaps rephrase as "...raising the water table"

Line 208-210: perhaps rephrase as "Similarly, there is unanimous disagreement that farmer-to-farmer communication is irrelevant to the success of an AECM"

Line 316-318: perhaps rephrase as "...differences in willingness to cooperate cannot be attributed solely to farm location"

Line 331-332: insert "support" after "advisory"

Make explicit reference to peatland carbon markets:

Lines 379 - 382 and/or 391-392 could usefully refer to emerging peatland carbon markets in the UK and the Netherlands, and to the EU's recent manual on carbon farming:

Introduction to the Peatland Code | IUCN UK Peatland Programme (iucn-uk-peatlandprogramme.org)

Paying for peat: rewetting peatlands in the Netherlands - Eurosite

Designing anInternational PeatlandCarbon Standard:Criteria, Best Practices,and Opportunities (umweltbundesamt.de)

Commission sets the carbon farming initiative in motion (europa.eu)

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We appreciate your feedback for improving the paper. You have suggested some better phrasing which will hopefully make the paper easier to read and some further references which support our findings, so thank you for that. We have now made updates in the new manuscript file and give an overview of the changes in the table below.

Kind regards,

The authors of this paper

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf