Renewable Energy Consumption, Water Crises, and Environmental Degradation with Moderating Role of Governance: Dynamic Panel Analysis under Cross-Sectional Dependence

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The study preliminarily investigates the relationship between renewable energy consumption, water availability and environmental degradation with the moderating effect of governance in the South Asian. It indicates that south Asian countries should improve political institutions, and promote renewable energy, water availability and clean production to improve the environment quality. Although the data seem to support the point of view enough, the article need substantial revisions and improvement to deepen the article. To be suitable for publishing in Sustainability, I suggest the authors to observe the points as follows.

1. The introduction part should be cut off and to specify why this study should be conducted. The common sense sentence should be removed, e.g. the first three paragraphs should be combined.
2. The abbreviations in the abstract should not exist.
3. What is the basis for the calculations? The raw data should be presented in the second part named Literature Review
4. The sentences or paragraph in terms of common senses should be removed. E.g “Water scarcity is a situation where the available unpolluted clean water surrounded by a country is lesser than the country’s demand.
5. Is there any need to introduce so many redundant contents on FDI (L.145-223)? Indeed, these contents should be condensed.
6. The following should be included in the manuscript to deepen the content of this paper. The tradition wastewater treatment process would produce large amount of sludge and the GHGs emissions, while algal photosynthesis would significant decrease the GHGs emissions and energy cost. Moreover, the food waste should be turned to fertilizers to support sustainable water engineering. The following references will help you to respond the questions. -Biotechnology advances Volume 37, Issue 7, 15 November 2019, 107414;-Water Research Volume 179, 1 July 2020, 115884;- Science of Total Environment Volume 704, 20 February 2020, 135453. These suggestive discussions are highly related to the content of the title “Renewable Energy Consumption, Water Crises” and can make the current research meaningful.
7. Typography issues should be paid attention in your revision for abstract and reference list.

Author Response

The introduction part should be cut off and to specify why this study should be conducted. The common sense sentence should be removed, e.g. the first three paragraphs should be combined.

• First three paragraphs have been combined and all common sense sentences have been removed i.e line number, 44, 62-70, 78, 79, 83, 90-94, 103,106, 135-139.

 

The abbreviations in the abstract should not exist.

• All abbreviations have been removed as suggested by the esteemed reviewer.

 

 

What is the basis for the calculations? The raw data should be presented in the second part named Literature Review

 

• We appreciate the esteemed reviewer’s comment but as per authors’ understanding of raw data means primary data or respondents wordings. In this study, we have utilized secondary data that has been collected from World Development Indicators (World Bank Group Database) and all calculations are based on raw data that has been extracted from the website and numerical data has been filtered in the spreadsheets. Furthermore, details of data have been relooked and provided on line 257-260

 

The sentences or paragraph in terms of common senses should be removed. E.g “Water scarcity is a situation where the available unpolluted clean water surrounded by a country is lesser than the country’s demand.

• Such sentences have been removed as per esteemed reviewer’s suggestion like line 175-178, 181, 183, 192-193, 256, 270,

 

Is there any need to introduce so many redundant contents on FDI (L.145-223)? Indeed, these contents should be condensed.

• Line 145 to 185 is used to describe the existing literature on renewable energy, water availability and environmental degradation while the line 187 to 205 describe the literature related to FDI and environment degradation as FDI is the main solution of environmental degradation in our theoretical model. Lines 205 to 223 are used to establish the importance of governance in the relationship between modelled variables. Moreover, all redundant sentences have been removed

 

The following should be included in the manuscript to deepen the content of this paper. The tradition wastewater treatment process would produce a large amount of sludge and GHGs emissions, while algal photosynthesis would significantly decrease the GHGs emissions and energy cost. Moreover, food waste should be turned to fertilizers to support sustainable water engineering.

• This suggestion has been included in manuscript on line 426-430 as following

 

            “Fourth, the traditional wastewater treatment process would produce a                   large amount of sludge and CO₂ emissions, so the government should                   promote algal photosynthesis because it would significantly decrease the               CO₂ emissions and energy cost. Moreover, food waste should be turned                 to fertilizers to support sustainable water reengineering”.

 

The following references will help you to respond to the questions. -Biotechnology advances Volume 37, Issue 7, 15 November 2019, 107414;-Water Research Volume 179, 1 July 2020, 115884;- Science of Total Environment Volume 704, 20 February 2020, 135453. These suggestive discussions are highly related to the content of the title “Renewable Energy Consumption, Water Crises” and can make the current research meaningful.

• We appreciate the reviewer who has suggested this study to be considered to answer the questions. The authors have cited this suggested study appropriately.

 

Typography issues should be paid attention to in your revision for the abstract and reference list.

• All the typography issues have been revisited by the authors and now found appropriate as per esteemed reviewer’s suggestion.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors addressed my questions. 

Author Response

Thank you so much

Reviewer 3 Report

 propose the publication of the paper in present form.

Author Response

Thank you so much

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for addressing my comments, now the paper is acceptable. It is a good piece of work!

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work investigates the relationship between renewable energy consumption, water availability and environmental degradation with the moderating effect of governance in the South Asian. It indicates that south Asian countries should improve political institutions, and promote renewable energy, water availability and clean production to improve the environment quality. Although the data seem to support the point of view enough, the article should further strength the part of discussion. To be suitable for publishing in Sustainability, I suggest the authors to observe the points following.

1. The introduction part should be cut off and to specify why this study should be conducted. The common sense sentence should be removed, such as “Everything around us is the environment. It can be living or nonliving factors; and consists of organic, substantial, and other natural forces.”(L. 35-36)
2. The full name for abbreviations should be given when it appears for the first time, e.g. L. 24 FDI, L. 42 IPCC, etc.
3. 40 greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) should be greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
4. The raw data and model calculations should be provided in the main text to make the results clearer.
5. Some of the Data and Methodology should be cut off and moved to the introduction part. For example， 271 to 279.
6. 297 to 304. Are there any reasons for choosing the formulas?
7. One or two tables can be displayed in figures (e.g. hot map) to make it more readable.
8. The engineering implications should be also included in the implications discussion rather than only policy implications. “Conclusion and Policy Implications” should be “Conclusion and Implications”. For engineering implications, the following should be included do expand the content of this article. The tradition wastewater treatment process would produce large amount of sludge and the CO2 emissions, while algal photosynthesis would significant decrease the CO2 emissions and energy cost. Moreover, the food waste should be turned to fertilizers to support sustainable water engineering. The following references will help you to respond the questions. -Biotechnology advances Volume 37, Issue 7, 15 November 2019, 107414;-Water Research Volume 179, 1 July 2020, 115884;- Science of Total Environment Volume 704, 20 February 2020, 135453. These discussions can also be related to “Water is another important factor that significantly contributes to environmental quality”(L.83).
9. Significance should be expressed as p value throughout the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

The English writing quality is low and significant English editing is required.

Abstract

Its not clear in your title what do you mean by moderate effect of governance

Wording in abstract should be modified in the abstract, the sentence below does not make sense,

“In this regard, the study collected data for the period of 1988 to 2018 are 19 collected from the World development indicator (WDI).”

English should be modified significantly, for example the sentence below is very long and confusing, consider cut the long sentences to few short sentences

“In panel data estimation, cross-sectional 20 dependence cause to produce misleading estimates; so this study applied a newly developed 21 technique, dynamic common correlated effect (DCCE) that produce unbiased estimate by 22 controlling the problem of cross-dependence.”

Line 27 what is FDI?

The abstract is confusing, consider clarifying the content and add some quantifications from your results too that.

Introduction

Line 35, “Everything around us is the environment.” very basic info is presented which is way below an scientific paper.  

Lines 34 to 39 do not add any background to the research topic, authors are encouraged to add literature review which has more advanced information from peer-reviewed papers related to the topic

Line 43, CO2, CH4, NOx are not poisonous gases consider adding a better adjective for these gases

Line 47, please clarify what do you mean by “environmental degradation”

Line 52, add reference

Line 62, what is volatile renewable?

What is 2000 in line 68

Line 83, what do you mean by environmental quality? You need to define that

Line 88 and 89, how water resources destroy the environment?

Line 90 “Water Extraction” is not a common term, its better to use something that is more common or define this

 

Line 93 : what is this “water shot fall”

Line 95: add reference

Line 100: rather than access the governments could develop the strategies related to the renewable resources

Line 116: why the table has no caption and it was not referred through the text

The introduction and lit review are very long, they took more than 6 pages of the paper, they should be shorten to only include the succinct information

Section 3. Data and Methodology

More detailed information should be provided regarding the data used for the modeling, like the number of data for each county, their spatial variations, etc

Governance and Foreign resources were identified as factors influence the CO2 emission, however more details and description regarding these factors are required, its not clear how these factors were quantified for six countries considered for this study, the input and constant values for the model were not presented

 

The conclusion that was drawn from this study regarding energy consumption and CO2 emission is presented as new finding as there are many studies presented this.

One of the main objective of this study was identification of the moderate role of governance, but no discussion was provided how that can influence, rather than quantification values, more description should be provided regarding its variation between studied countries, and also if the indicator used in this study well define its impact on environmental degradation

Table 2, shows the overall values, how they were different between the studied countries?

Reviewer 3 Report

It is an interesting paper, the authors consider making the following changes.

1. Citations in text must be written according to the journal’s guidelines.
2. The aim of study is repeated many times in the text and this becomes tiresome for the reader.
3. The abbreviation FDI should be explained as it is presented for the first time.
4. Lines 36-38 must be supported by literature sources.
5. Argumentation in lines 55-56 must be improved. In addition, citations must be added as there are lots of studies on this topic.
6. Lines 60-62 are somewhat superficial and need to be further analyzed.
7. Section “Data and Methodology” must be improved extensively and should be revised in a way that the methods described can be reproduced by other researchers.
8. A more careful language editing is needed