Insights from Testing a Modified Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways Approach for Spatial Planning at the Municipal Level

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper entitled: "Insights from Testing a Modified Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways Approach for Spatial Planning at the Municipal Level"
 deals with the possibility to handle large uncertainties in climate change data, via Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP). More precisely, it deals with a light version of DAPP tool, with the aim of using adaptive pathway approaches for spatial planning situations at the municipal level, applied to 3 different municipalities in Sweden, with reference to the raising of the sea level in the next future.

The paper is well written and clear, and does not require particular revision. Nevertheless, I have the following requests for the Authors
- Please add a paragraph explaining what DAPP is. You wrote: "DAPP [19] and Collaborative Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) [20] are two state-of-the- art decision-support approaches for creating adaptive pathways". I believe that this is not enough, even if you added a reference to it (19)
- Please, limit the references to paper written in Swedish to those which are extremely necessary. However, in this case, add the English translation of the title, because for foreigner researchers (like me) those references are not meaningful.

Author Response

Referee 1 Comments to the Author
"The paper entitled: "Insights from Testing a Modified Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways Approach for Spatial Planning at the Municipal Level" deals with the possibility to handle large uncertainties in climate change data, via Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP). More precisely, it deals with a light version of DAPP tool, with the aim of using adaptive pathway approaches for spatial planning situations at the municipal level, applied to 3 different municipalities in Sweden, with reference to the raising of the sea level in the next future.

The paper is well written and clear, and does not require particular revision."

Thank you for the very positive review.

"Nevertheless, I have the following requests for the Authors

- Please add a paragraph explaining what DAPP is. You wrote: "DAPP [19] and Collaborative Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) [20] are two state-of-the- art decision-support approaches for creating adaptive pathways". I believe that this is not enough, even if you added a reference to it (19)"

We have added a description of the DAPP approach. Since this is a special issue on pathway methods, we still believe that the audience is somewhat familiar with this method and similar ones, so we have still tried to keep it short.

"- Please, limit the references to paper written in Swedish to those which are extremely necessary. However, in this case, add the English translation of the title, because for foreigner researchers (like me) those references are not meaningful."

We have kept the number of Swedish references as low as possible. However the ones remaining are not possible to exclude, since they either contains necessary information on the studied cases (such as the municipalities’ comprehensive plans or relevant legislation) or represents the case study reports that were written in Swedish in order to be used by the local professionals.

English translations of the titles have now been provided to all references.

Reviewer 2 Report

This article presents a method for spatial planning situations, the authors tested the method to the future sea-level rise issue in three different municipalities in Sweden. The topic is interspersing, and I have some specific comments to improve this article.

1, Abstract, need to further highlight the main founding of this study. And point out the take home message to the readers.

2, How many participants for each workshop would be a good number to yield some statistics answers?

3, Line 124, is ‘the groups consisted typically of 5-8 persons and … 2-4 researchers’ are the total participants for the workshop? Need to make this clear.

4, Would it be more productive to conduct some survey along with or before the workshop?

5, Table 3, ‘the examples are not complete’, if the main parts are all in the table, could change it to ‘cover the main concerns’ instead of ‘not complete’.

6, The current conclusion part is too short, and it would be good to combine the conclusion with the discussion, as ‘4, Conclusions and discussions’.

7, What the direction to improve this current approach?

8, Need to link the references in a proper way. 

Author Response

Referee 2 Comments to the Author
"This article presents a method for spatial planning situations, the authors tested the method to the future sea-level rise issue in three different municipalities in Sweden. The topic is interspersing, and I have some specific comments to improve this article."

"1, Abstract, need to further highlight the main founding of this study. And point out the take home message to the readers."

We have rewritten the abstract to make the messages of the paper more clear.

"2, How many participants for each workshop would be a good number to yield some statistics answers?"

We have now proved the number of participants in Table 1. However, since the concluding discussion is based on comments and reflections from the workshops and not a questionnaire, statistics are not possible to calculate.

"3, Line 124, is ‘the groups consisted typically of 5-8 persons and ... 2-4 researchers’ are the total participants for the workshop? Need to make this clear."

This sentence has been changed to provide a clearer picture.

"4, Would it be more productive to conduct some survey along with or before the workshop?"

Yes, in hindsight we should perhaps have made a formal survey as well. However, we did ask for comments on feedback in the final part of Workshop 3, and the comments we got were transcribed and documented in our notes and were used as a basis for insights from testing the method.

"5, Table 3, ‘the examples are not complete’, if the main parts are all in the table, could change it to ‘cover the main concerns’ instead of ‘not complete’."

We have changed the table caption accordingly. We have also revised the table to fit into one page.

"6, The current conclusion part is too short, and it would be good to combine the conclusion with the discussion, as ‘4, Conclusions and discussions’."

We have combined the two sections as suggested and added some sentences in the concluding discussion, further highlighting some findings, planned forthcoming research, as well as identified research needs

"7, What the direction to improve this current approach?

We have provided a number of suggestions for future research, some of which are related to the current approach (recommendations of appropriate strategic level, new methods to promote flexible solutions). As for the directions of DAPP-light, that is partly the focus of planned future research.

“8, Need to link the references in a proper way."”

The references are changed accordingly and converted to static text.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

This version is fine.