Drivers, Impacts and Mitigation of Increased Sedimentation in the Hydropower Reservoirs of East Africa

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper  deals with drivers, impacts and mitigation of reservoir for electric production in East Africa.

There is a certain unbalace in the paper, regarding information on East Africa.

A  map with the countries included certainly help the readers.

Comments on Drivers, impacts and mitigation of increased sedimentation in the hydropower reservoirs of East Africa

This revue  paper provides a detailed and long description on drivers, impacts and mitigation of increased sedimentation in  the hydropower reservoirs of East Africa .

But the paper is unbalanced since the information on East Africa itself  is scarce and not updated.

A map with the East African countries would help the readers.

Line118  -The coordinates for East  Africa need checking

The references are  fine, but data on sedimentation of African reservoirs is scarce.

The paper needs some revision on the English

Line 24 -silting

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting study on drivers, impacts and mitigation of increased sedimentation in the hydropower reservoirs of East Africa. The paper is rich in information and has good results, but there are several major issues that the authors have to solve during the revision:

1) The abstract is too descriptive and too long. It needs to have the following structure: what the paper is about; what is its added value to current debates in hydropower studies; what methods are used; the findings.

2) The Introduction is also too long. Authors have to split the current introduction of the paper into two sections: introduction and literature review. The introduction has to point also to other relevant studies. For instance where authors say that hydropower 'provide other essential economic and ecological resources, such as irrigation and drinking water sources for agriculture and livestock, recreational spaces and fishing habitats' they can mention several important studies on hydropower worldwide (see Cecilia Llamosas and Benjamin Sovacool's recent review on hydropower, and see also Lucian Vesalon's study on the Iron Gates hydropower as a political power etc. Also, it needs to be shortly mentioned that there could be also negative costs of hydropower constructions which could lead to involuntary displacement and this could further determine trauma memories of the displaced people (see P.S. Gutman's study in Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 1994 or see recent studies as the study of Varan Claudia who wrote in journal Area about this in 2018 ad see S. Trussart, D. Messier, V. Roquet and S. Aki's study on hydropower mitigations issues in journal Energy Policy, 2002). Finally, introduction should clearly mention what this paper brings new to existing hydropower literature.

2) Connected to the above point 1, a literature review on hydropower development worlwide and the reservoir sedimentation dimension is needed. From the 200 cited references of this paper authors can develop a better literature review - some of this is pretty good presented at the moment in the introduction, but it needs to be expanded. Some works mentioned above could be rementioned in the literature review.

3) The title of paper's current section 'Review Approach' should be written as 'Review Approach on Hydropower Developments in East Africa' ;

3) The results are good, but there is no discussion in this paper. Authors have to write 4-5 paragraphs of discussions, meaning how their findings are linked to the exisiting literature on hydropower, and mainly gow they are linked to hydropower reservoir sedimentations.

5) Conclusions could briefly mention limitations of the study and potential policy recommendations.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors have much improved their paper. A minor revision is further needed.

First, the title of figure entitled ' A map of the Eastern Africa region with selected hydropower dams...' should be better named as 'Selected hydropower dams in the Eastern Africa:...' Also, authors have two figures named Figure 1 - they have to number the above mentioned figure as Figure 2. Moreover, in-text links to these figures must be added too.

Second, on page 2 lines 49-51 the sentence 'Moreover, increased sedimentation can cause flooding that may disrupt the infrastructure, loss of life and property and involuntary resettlement, which could further determine trauma memories of the displaced people' has to be re-written in two separate sentences: 'Moreover, increased sedimentation can cause flooding that may disrupt the local infrastructure'; and 'Among their longer term negative impact, mega-projects as hydropower constructions could cause loss of life and property and involuntary resettlement, which could further determine trauma memories of the displaced people' .

Third, some paragraphs are too long. They can be split in two smaller paragraphs, see for example the last paragraph of section 4 and the first paragraph in the conclusions.

Finally, authors have to attentively check that all article references have page numbers at the end, see references 5, 71-73 etc.

Author Response

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