A Study on the Relationship between Income Change and the Water Footprint of Food Consumption in Urban China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for inviting me to review the manuscript “Impacts of income change on the water footprint of food consumption in urban China” which intend to empirically analyze the relationship between the water footprint of food consumption and income in the urban Guangdong Province of China and further simulate the impact of changes in income distribution on the water footprint of food consumption.
After reading the whole manuscript, I have some main concerns related to the methodological approach, the structure of the paper, and the meaning of the results. In general, the structure needs to reform, the discussion is still missing, the abstract and conclusion need an intensive improvement accordingly to the new discussion section. My main comments are as follows:
- The title: In the current form, the authors did not discuss significantly the “impact” of changes in income change on the water footprint of food consumption but only the “relationship” among them.
- Abstract: In the current abstract is the short version of the results but not a complete abstract since authors simply report the results and numbers without drawing meaningful messages from their study. I suggest reconstructing the abstract by relacing the statistic numbers with some meaningful messages for wider audiences, policymakers, and stakeholders.
- Keywords: the keyword “nonlinear” is very vague. Please replace it with a more specific term that relevant to the study.
- Introduction: Need to reconstruct
- The paragraph from lines 52-63 needs to move before the paragraph from lines 42-51 since it explains the context of the study and the reason why we need to carry out this study.
- The paragraph from lines 63-69 needs some references to the corresponding sections. Otherwise, this paragraph does not contribute to the understanding of the manuscript.
- Literature review:
- This section needs to merge with the Introduction part since there is not any difference among these sections. Moreover, the structure of the manuscript needs to be aligned with the one recommended by this journal.
- The literature should a broad context to a specific context of the case study and some relevant works. In the current form, the author goes straight to a specific one that narrowed the concept for the reader.
- Please explain the phrase “From the perspective of foreign studies” (line 103).
- Conceptual Framework and Research Hypotheses:
- This part should be a sub-section of Data and Method section. Please read carefully the structure recommended by this journal.
- Line 130-133: Indicating the unit of all components such as Q and IWF.
- Line 134-137: Clarifying which formula was used to calculate the ratio of the water footprint of nine types of food to the nine types of food expenditure. Please explain where this ratio was used in the manuscript afterward.
- Provide the reference to support the following statements “Based on the theory of the consumption function” (line 140), “From the theoretical analysis” (line 145), and “income growth may lead to a shift in diet structure to animal food” (line 148). In general, this section needs an extensive improvement related to the references to support what the authors said.
- Data and method
- Line 161: Why authors used data of 2009 for this study? I supposed that the national statistic data provided regularly every five years. So, I expected data for the more recent year. Since the author used data of 2009, the results of this study may not be up-to-date and the critical messages from this study may not be useful for decision-makers and planners in the current context.
- Line 167-168: what is the total size of the data. Why the author decided to use randomly 2474 recorded data. Did the author make a sensitivity analysis of the output concerning the selection of input?
- I suggest having a figure of the case study, including geolocation of the case study, location of the urban area, and the location of the 2474 recorded data to see the distribution of the input data.
- Line 208-209: Please justify the choice of formula 3. Why is it only 2nd order but not 3rd order or a higher order?
- Line 211: Clarify how these variables (i.e. household size, the average age of the household members, average education level, household registration, the proportion of FAFH, city size, regional variables) were aggregated into a single Z variable as written in the formula (4)
- The subsection “Scenario” is missing since it should be part of the method section that drives the workflow.
- Results
- Did the authors combine the section Results with Discussion since the Discussion section is missing in the current form? If yes, please change the title of this section and Results and Discussion.
- Please avoid repeating the same thing/numbers from the table into the text and vice versa. For example, paragraphs from line 375-396 is the narrative description of Table 5 without any extension or discussion the meaning of these numbers but repeating the same numbers. Similar issue for Table 3.
- Line 352-358: Please justify the choice of 10% for the change of capita income? Is there any reference with the same choice?
- Line 359: Check the cross-reference of Table 5. The text is referring to another table.
- Discussion: This part is totally missing. Also, I do not find any discussion of the findings and their implications in relation to the previous works or similar case studies in the Result section.
- Conclusion: Again, the authors repeat the statistic numbers without drawing important messages from these numbers. For instance, line 416-419 “When household per capita income is lower than the threshold value of income, the income elasticity of the water footprint of food consumption is 0.75. When the threshold value of income is crossed, the income elasticity is converted to 0.23”. What is the reason behind explaining this change? What are the differences between 0.75 and 0.23? The paragraph from line 421-430 simply repeat the result section and does not support the main paragraph idea “revenue growth by narrowing the income gap will considerably increase the water footprint of food consumption for the whole society”.
Other minor comments:
- The term “water footprint of food consumption” was used many times in this paper, I suggest using the abbreviation for this to reduce the length of the manuscript.
- I suggest using “positive effect” rather than “positive impact” in the whole manuscript since “impact” already has a negative meaning.
- Line 95: missing reference number of Kang et al.
- Line 102: “the” before “research”
- Line 109: “the” before “greatest”
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The article proposed for publication empirically analyzes the relationship between water footprint of food consumption and income in the Chinese province of Guangdong and further simulate the impact of changes in income distribution on the water footprint of food consumption. The article is very well written, pleasant to read and has a rigorous structure.
In order to implement the literature analysis I suggest this new study:
Miglietta, P. P., De Leo, F., Coluccia, B., Vecchio, Y., & Capitanio, F. (2021). Evaluation of Virtual Water and Water Sustainability of Dairy Production in Trentino Alto Adige (North-Eastern Italy). Animals, 11(4), 1047.
Moreover, to improve the overall quality of the study, I suggest to discuss the results by comparing them with previous studies on the subject.
Finally, in the conclusion section, it would be appropriate to include the limits and possible future developments of the study.
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Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
see the attached file
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
This is an important topic and is dealt with well. Good range of references.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for aggregating my comments and suggestion in the revised manuscript. The authors answered all my comments with a high level of detail and satisfaction. The manuscript is much better now. I just have a little concern about the use of data in 2009 but the authors justified that it was a good source of data with a high level of detail for this kind of study.
Good luck!
Author Response
Thank you so much for your comments. We revised our manuscript according to the suggestions given by other reviewers and edited the language.
Reviewer 3 Report
see attached file
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
