Modelling of Regional Economic Metabolism
, Myriam Lopes 1, Sérgio Costa 2 and Carlos Borrego 1Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
your manuscript is very interesting and actual, the implementation of CE models and practices are very needed in terms of worsening state of the climate and environment. I find chapters 1, 2, 3 very interesting and beneficial, in the chapter 4 you are focused mainly on building some conceptual model, which have been proposed in your previous research, so I am not sure if subchapter 4.2 brings something new to this methodology and to the scientific area. It would be helpful if some local Portuguese data are applied.
What about the model´s application in other European countries? How you propose to check for its suitability? What about the countries with poor CE implementation? Such as Slovakia, etc.
Please check and fix some formatting issues...fonts, etc. Can you use more studies about current state of the art in European countries?
Author Response
The outcomes showed in subchapter 4.2. are in fact an example of REMET-UA model application to a Portuguese region. In the scope of the Portuguese Plan for Circular Economy, the Portuguese Regional Coordination and Development Commission were obligated to developed regional economic metabolism assessments. To respond to this need, the authors developed the REMET-UA model. The section 4.1.Data gathering and good practices, are a result of the authors experience into apply the model to a case study. However, for confidentiality reasons the authors only shows the potentialities of REMET-model (section 4.2.) without further explore the obtained results.
Despite has being developed to Portuguese regions, the model has a great potentiality for scalability. The model is suitable to be adapted to any territorial scale and flexible to changes according to user needs, so can easily be applied for other European countries, even in countries with poor circular economy implementation. The only model limitation is the availability of data. As the authors mentioned in the manuscript, the feasibility of model outputs are directly related to the quality of the input data.
Reviewer 2 Report
The main idea of the paper is to describe and discuss REMET-UA model designed to model regional economic metabolism. But in my view there are following problems: 1. There is no sufficient comparison with the similar input-output models to understand innovative character and advantages of REMET-UA model especially when we know that it is based on existing indicators from Eurostat (lines 325-326). 2. Paper deals with two major concepts - CE and UM switching from one to another between sections. It would be better if authors show how they see the relationship between these two concepts and build paper in more logical way. 3.In the title of the paper the regional metabolism model is considered but in the paper authors deals mostly with urban metabolism concept. So what is the difference if there is one. I think we need some short explanations.
Also there several smaller comments: 1. table 1 (line 129) has incorrect title. It's not the comarison (in this case you will need to use some criteria of comparison), it's description. 2. Line 117. It seems like something is missing because it is not clear what makes possible the input-output analysis. 3.Line 318. Please use English word for international and national.
Author Response
The REMET-UA model were developed following the Eurostat indicators and according to six principles. Despite the indicators provided by REMET-UA are similar to the outputs provided by other input-output models, there are three main aspects that distinguish REMET-UA for similar ones, namely: i) it is scalable, which means that the model can be adapted to any territorial scale and flexible to alterations according to user needs); ii) it is participative, which means that it was developed with help of regional agents); and iii) it is regionalized, which means that the model is able to have into account interactions between NTUS III sub-regions.
The authors think that the connection between the concepts of CE and UM are explained clearly in each sector. In this article we were not trying to achieve to explain the connection between concepts but only how some works in UM resulted in european legislation of CE.
The authors do not know if they fully understood the reviewers' question. The outcomes showed in the manuscript (subchapter 4.2.) are a result of REMET-UA model application to a Portuguese region. In the scope of the Portuguese Plan for Circular Economy, the Portuguese Regional Coordination and Development Commission were obligated to developed regional economic metabolism assessments. To respond to this need, the authors developed the REMET-UA model. The section 4.1.Data gathering and good practices, are a result of the authors experience into apply the model to a case study. However, for confidentiality reasons the authors only shows the potentialities of REMET-UA model (section 4.2.) without further explore the obtained results.
