Adoption of Climate Smart Agricultural Practices through Women Involvement in Decision Making Process: Exploring the Role of Empowerment and Innovativeness

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study deals with a relevant topic for the present day, with objectives, methods and results consistent with what was proposed. I suggest that, in the conclusion, the potential social, economic and environmental impacts of the study be highlighted, if its results can be used to increase the empowerment of women working in agriculture in emerging countries.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Taking Pakistan as a case study, this study explores the effect of female farmers’ empowerment and innovativeness on the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices. My comments are as the following:

Introduction

This study focused on exploring factors influencing female farmers’ CSA adoption with an emphasis on the role of empowerment and innovativeness. From the perspective of bridging the gender gap, the focus on female farmers’ empowerment and innovativeness are imperative. However, when the aim is to explore factors influencing farmers’ CSA adoption, this research focus may be somewhat misleading unless the following situations are the status quo in Pakistan: (1) female-run farms take a significant proportion of the farming community; and (2) the role of farmers’ empowerment and innovativeness on CSA adoption has been well studied in the previous literature. That is, there is a missing link between the focus on female farmers and the adoption of CSA. If the gender composition in Pakistan’s farming sector is say, 8:2, then it would be more meaningful to explore the factors driving the adoption of CSA while controlling for gender.

Materials and Methods

What is “3” in Equations (1)-(2) standing for? For an appropriate description of the multivariate probit model, please follow some published references and cite the references.

This study uses typology to categorize CSA practices. It is not clear how Table 1 is produced using typology. Please describe it in more detail.

Minor comments

I find some editorial problems with the manuscript. Please make a thorough check with the manuscript.

For example, in the Abstract:

The adaptation to such threats is both a challenge as well opportunity … -> “as well” should be “as well as”.

This outcome achieving the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals … -> “achieving” should be “achieved”.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I sincerely congratulate the authors for this extensive research covering such an important and contemporary area. The complete write-up, especially its flow through the presentation of ideas under strong theoretical rigour and empirical analysis certainly adds value to the existing literature. However, the authors are suggested to incorporate the following aspects (as part of minor revisions) for the further enrichment of the output.

1.       In the abstract of this study the acronym CSA has been mistyped as CAS. Please oversee the article rigorously as I find certain grammatical errors while reading the same.

2.        Support from the literature (in the form of citations) appears relatively lesser. Please consider providing adequate and contemporary literary support wherever possible.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have responded effectively to all my comments in the first-round revision. I do not have any further comments on this article except for one minor suggestion:

The footnote of the Tables: "*, and ** show significance levels at 1%, and 5% respectively." is not consistent with the common rules to denote the level of significance in the literature which use more *'s to denote smaller number for the significance level. Also, usually there are three significance levels: 10%, 5% and 1%. Please make corresponding changes.

Author Response

Reviewer 2

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have responded effectively to all my comments in the first-round revision. I do not have any further comments on this article except for one minor suggestion:

Comment: The footnote of the Tables: "*, and ** show significance levels at 1%, and 5% respectively." is not consistent with the common rules to denote the level of significance in the literature which use more *'s to denote smaller number for the significance level. Also, usually there are three significance levels: 10%, 5% and 1%. Please make corresponding changes.

Authors’ response: Respected reviewer, We have reversed the *’s signs in the table footnotes as well as in the tables. Thank you for your suggestion, as it will make it consistent with the literature. As far as your suggestion about the significance levels is concerned, we would like to inform you that our significance levels either fell into these two ranges (1% and 5%) or outside 10%. Therefore, no table footnote contained the significance level of 10%. We would like to thank you once again for giving us suggestions/comments to improve the quality of this article.