Assessment of Meteorological and Agricultural Drought Occurrence in Central Poland in 1961–2020 as an Element of the Climatic Risk to Crop Production
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is an interesting research paper dealing with meteorological and agricultural droughts in Poland.
However there are some major points to be reflected:
a) Line 26-71: This introduction part is too much concentrated on the situation in Poland. The reader should understand the Global and especially the European situation and then get the information about the situation in Poland
b) Line 138-140: The quality of the rain and air temperature data is not described enough precisely. What kind of instruments have been used to gain the data? Over all the 60 years the instruments have been changed? How was the procedure for the homogenization of the data? Problems with gaps of data and so on?
c) Line 133: This is probably the most obvious problem of the study: All findings rely on only one measuring point!! The study would gain if there are 2-3 comparing meteorological stations involved. Are the results then the same?
d) Line 356-367: Again the interpretation of the results is too much focused on Poland. It is necessary to include studies from neighbouring countries like Germany or Russia to compare the findings
Author Response
Please the Reviewer to find the responses to your comments in the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The reviewed paper is an intriguing contribution in the field of climate measurement and its effects on agriculture production. The work is well drafted and balanced though it might be catching more effectively the journal's aims.
- Kindly provide more context both within the abstract and the main text.
- I suggest introducing the paper's structure at the end of section.
- Because you are submitting this paper to a generalistic agriculture policy journal, perhaps it would make sense to offer an introduction to technical issues. This includes the methodology section that, in my opinion, may be clearer - especially for Agriculture's readership.
- It would be worth to provide some sort of social-ecological perspective on the tackled topics, highlighting key items such as climate, food and resource justice, sustainability, vulnerability, resilience, etc. This would also help better liaising the climate risk issues. Please, see: - https://doi.org/10.3390/economies9020047
- In general terms, it would be important to not greatly rely on domestic publications/reports. Instead, it would be better to expand the reference list by adding international scholarly sectoral publications.
- The conclusions are dry. I recommend expanding them, including a limitations and future studies paragraph.
- Adding a policy paragraph focusing on agriculture within the conclusions section would be pivotal.
Author Response
Please the Reviewer to find the responses to your comments in the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper takes a pertinent topic for investigation with clear approach and objectives. The Introduciton and methods are aptly put forth but the main drawback lies in its deficiency to contribute in the existing literature or at least authors fail to highlight this in their work in terms of novelty of approach (although they use conventional regression and correlation techniques for relationship determination and trend estimation). If the approach is redundant, then the issue could be a novel one, at least authors need to highlight such limitations or novelties, if any.
The results are clear and give much insights for policy and research while conclusions are not insightful and need sufficient work to allay any shortcomings. There are frequent, although not too much, grammatical lapses which could be avoided by a thorough read, I have highlighted few for easy reference.
Section 2.1: There is no mention of data sources as against the given heading. The last word of this section too needs revisit.
Minor: I have noted few typos and grammatical/structural issues as well. For example in Introduction: 'As indicated by many sources [2–4], the phenomenon of drought is not only attributed to arid or semi-arid climates.' its an incomplete sentence. In abstract, this sentence is confusing as to where 'they' is attributed is not clear 'Crop production, in the studied region, has been conducted in conditions of rainfall deficits, however, they showed neither significant nor a specific direction of changes.'
Lines 96-101: Revisit
Author Response
Please the Reviewer to find the responses to your comments in the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The author revised the paper according to the suggestions of the reviewer. The research of the authors is now better embedded in an international context. All the risen points by the reviewer are treated well.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer, thank you very much for all your valuable comments which helped us improving our work.
Kind regards,
The Authors
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors did a good job in addressing all reviewers' comments. I only have two additional notations to further improve the work. 1. Check for remaining typos and grammar issues. 2. Accidently, this doi dropped out into comments to the editor and could be of help to better framing the issue: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.04.058. Provided this, I trust the paper will be ready for getting published.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer, thank you very much for all valuable comments that helped us improve our work. Thank you for submitting the paper on the effectiveness of the food sustainability policy. This helped us to better formulate the problem in the Conclusions. The text has been checked for grammatical correctness and the English spelling
Kind regards,
Authors
Reviewer 3 Report
Thanks to the authors for revising and considering the comments. The paper has now attained a shape worthy of publishing.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer, thank you very much for all your valuable comments which helped us improving our work.
Kind regards,
The Authors
