Exploring the Effects of Climate Change on Farming System Choice: A Farm-Level Space-for-Time Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper proposes a new framework to explore 12 the marginal effect of climate change on the choice of the farming system. However, the quality of presentation could be improved by further revisions. Some comments and suggestions below to help enhance the overall clarity and impact of this study.

[1] In line 14-15, "Using a spatial-explicit farming system choice-model developed by a previous study...". It would be beneficial to elaborate on the reason of choosing to use a model from a previous study and what sets your study apart from this previous work. Clarifying the significance and novelty of this research approach will strengthen this paper.

[2] In line 123, remove the hyphen before "Location" for improved readability.

[3] Table 1 could benefit from simplification and better readability. Ensure that the table is clear, concise, and effectively conveys the necessary information.

[4] In line 142, 150, etc, “The FS predictive model was also taken from [16]“, Instead of using reference numbers, it is recommended to include the author's name when citing the source. This will make it easier for readers to identify and locate the referenced work without repeatedly checking the reference list.

[5] In line 173, similar to point 2, in line 173 and all other instances, please remove the hyphen before "Observed" to improve consistency and readability.

[6] In line 226, Table 2 appears more like a figure. Consider revising the format of Table 2 to enhance its clarity and ensure that it effectively communicates the data.

[7] In line 286, remove the period before "[13]" for consistency in your referencing style.

[8] The discussion section appears to be quite lengthy. Consider summarizing and focusing on the most critical points to maintain reader engagement and clarity.

[9] It would be helpful to clarify the practical implications of your results and any potential recommendations that can be derived from your findings. How can your research contribute to decision-making in the context of farming system choices in the face of climate change?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments: Exploring the marginal effects of climate change on farming system choice: a farm-level space-for-time approach

From the title, just noting exploring of marginal effects makes the effort look like a very minor contribution while in the introduction, authors do not explain what they call as marginal effects, at least to make clear for people with less or no background of statistics or econometrics. Authors note that other works on farming resilience to climate change focus on short- to medium-term adaptation strategies, such as crop diversification, the adoption of more drought-resistant varieties, adjustments in planting and harvest dates, or increasing irrigation and not in the long-term impacts where, by hypothesis, the magnitude of climate change may become incompatible with adjustments within the same FS, and may force farmers to undertake deeper changes, eventually leading them to switching into a different FS. To test this hypothesis, they propose to explore the effects of climate change on FS choice using a discrete choice model approach, where the categorical dependent variable represents the range of available FS to farmers, and the independent variables include a diversity of drivers of FS choice, including climatic variables. The specific objectives too need a proper revisit as just exploring marginal effects or comparing findings of two different techniques would not be interesting for readers of science or policy. There is no explanation on the quantitative analysis involving a statistical approach to reach to the conclusions related to the effects of climate change on FS choice as given in 3.2. Results of the article are too limited (hardly 3 pages with much of tables and figures) while discussion protracts significantly with lot of redundancy. How findings/discussion in 4.2 been achieved is not clear from the methods? A lot of studies from the authors are cited to promote self-citation. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

It was intereting to read this article, however, the results were largely predictable. The discussion was logical and reasoned. I have no qustions, let,s see, what the future brings.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the time and care in reviewing our article.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have addressed many of my concerns and the article looks fine now. It would also be great if authors could specifically highlight the novelty of this work along with any research gap that is being filled. Moreover, noting on the limitations of this work and/or documenting future perspective that could guide ansuing research to some specific direction.

Author Response

We thank Reviewer 2 for her/his commitment and effort in contributing to improving the article. We acknowledge that the mentioned aspects are very important. Yet, we would like to note that in our previous review of the article we went through a series of changes that were requested by Reviewer 1 which, we believe, addressed the aspects that are now being raised. For example, regarding highlighting the novelty of the article, we added a paragraph in the Introduction specifically for this purpose, stating: "We believe that this FS approach to anticipating farmers' response to climate change is new in the literature, where adaptation studies focused on adjustments to agricultural practices within the same FS have prevailed. » L.43-45. This statement adds to others that already existed, which also intended to draw attention to the innovative nature of the article such as, for example: «Still, to our knowledge, this coupling of a FS discrete choice model with a space-for-time substitution approach is a pioneer in empirical studies on the effects of climate change applied to the agricultural sector. » L.87-89. In any case, to meet the Reviewer's comment we have now added the following two texts to the Discussion to reiterate its innovative nature more explicitly: « The use of a space-for-time substitution approach proved to be a wise choice to overcome the limitation of having only stationary data on the spatial distribution of FS (relative to a single year), which we believe to be a novelty in research on the effects of climate change applied to the agricultural sector. » L.317-320, and « This use of multivariate choice models to study the effect of climate change on FS choice based on a multitude of socioeconomic and biophysical factors is also new in the literature, as far as we know. » L.336-338.

As for noting the limitations of the article and leaving proposals for future research, we believe that we duly observed these aspects by including in the Discussion a section specifically dedicated to these issues, which we called «Strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach» (section 4.3), which already extends for more than one page. More specifically, the limitations of the study are addressed in lines 486-506, and in lines 480-485 we leave some suggestions about future developments that could be followed with this research approach, suggesting that: « With minor adjustments, the same basic approach could be used to explore, for example, how public policies could be implemented to encourage farmers to adopt particular FS, aimed at ensuring desired levels of food security or sufficient provision of socially valued public goods, provided that the random forest choice-model include some comparative profitability variable discriminating the FS. Such possibilities stand as proposals for future research. ». We hope that this can be well accepted by the Reviewer, to also avoid lengthening the text too much, which we were asked to reduce in the previous review.