The Role of Environmental Law in Farmers’ Environment-Protecting Intentions and Behavior Based on Their Legal Cognition: A Case Study of Jiangxi Province, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript attempts to correlate the moderating role of environmental legislation with the intention and behavioural modulation of farmers to protect the environment. The authors make a nice attempt to address the issue since farming practises contribute a lot to environmental degradation and, for the sustainability of the planet, farmers need to be trained to alleviate the damage to the environment. However, I have certain concerns about the work.
The title is too long and confusing. It is more of a statement and does not reflect the actual work or findings.
Another problem is that the study is based on farmers perceptions in a province of China. However, there is no mention of the study area or region. How can the researchers justify the title based on a limited finding?
In my opinion, based on previous literature, authors must provide a hypothesis or robust rationale for why this work is important.
The methodology section must include full details about the study site.
Where is the questionnaire used to collect the data? Who validated it?
The details pertaining to the statistical analyses should be revised and more details given. Hardly any details are provided. What were the correlations between various attributes related to environmental degradation and farmer behaviour? Which factor contributes the most? Appropriate statistical appraisal is missing.
Author Response
First of all, I would like to thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to comment on our manuscript. We have tried to include every comment and suggestion in the revised manuscript. We hope that we have successfully addressed all of your concerns. We also hope it will surely improve the quality of our research work.
Respected reviewer, please see attachment for our point to point response to your comments.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This study investigated the environmental laws’ moderating role in relation to environment-protecting intentions and behavior based on their legal cognition. Based on 1350 randomly selected farmers from Jiangxi province, this study confirm the theory of planned behavior through a structural equation model. Overall, the topic interesting and the paper is well written. The reviewer strongly recommend the paper to be accepted, which can contribute to our research community. At the same time, the authors are advised to consider the following suggestions to further improve the paper quality.
(1) When describing environmental behavior and research results, more background information and specific data should be provided to better understand the research conclusions.
(2) When describing the demographic characteristics of the sampled farmers, it is possible to provide a more detailed description of age, education, family income, and other aspects, and to provide more statistical data related to the survey content.
(3) Some of the statements in the Introduction requires support from existing studies. For example, “Now, everyone in the world knows how important it is to protect the environment” can be supported by Fuel, 2018; 232: 833-844 and SAE Technical Paper 2023-01-0192. Also, “Coal and natural gas have lately replaced oil and electricity as the primary sources of non-commercial energy consumption in rural areas” can be supported by SAE Technical Paper 2020-01-5003 and Journal of Energy Resources Technology, 2020; 142(12): 122308. Moreover, “The transformation of the energy structure in rural areas has resulted in an increase in environmental issues” can be supported by SAE Technical Paper 2023-01-0334 and Applied Energy, 2021; 300: 117413. Further, “The combustion of fossil fuels has historically been blamed for the majority of CO2 emissions” can be supported by Energy, 2023; 262: 125587 and Journal of Energy Resources Technology, 2023; 145(1): 012302.
(4) When describing the measurement posture and perceptual behavior control methods used in the research, more references to relevant literature and descriptions of specific implementation methods can be provided, so that readers can better understand the research methods and results.
(5) When proposing index scores for measurement modes, it is recommended to also explain the threshold range of these indices, as well as the meaning and evaluation criteria they represent.
(6) When evaluating the model structure, it is recommended to provide more specific information and details, such as the statistical methods used, corresponding results, and explanation of the reasons.
(7) When conducting effectiveness and convergence tests, it is recommended to provide a specific explanation of the methods used and explain why they are used, as well as their applicability and reliability.
(8) When explaining the factor load table, it is recommended to further explain the meaning and importance represented by each factor in order to better understand the effectiveness of the structure and related statistical results.
(9) When proposing Cronbach α It is recommended to explain the basis and practical application scenarios of this threshold, and whether the obtained results meet the standards and are reasonable.
(10) The sentences in the article still need to be modified, and some places may not read smoothly.
Author Response
First of all, I would like to thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to comment on our manuscript. We have tried to include every comment and suggestion in the revised manuscript. We hope that we have successfully addressed all of your concerns. We also hope it will surely improve the quality of our research work.
Respected reviewer, please see attachment for our point to point response to your comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have made innovative efforts in understanding farmers’ environmental protection behavior through their cognition towards environmental protection laws/policies through surveys of farmers in Jiangxi Province of China. The following issues must be addressed for further improvements:
1. Please briefly describe the interior attitude and outward attitude when it first appears in Line 117.
2. Sampling and data collection: How are the counties, villages, and farmers randomly selected? Why are these numbers of counties, villages, and farmers selected?
3. Sampling and data collection: the description is problematic. The table shows the “average” age is 40 years old with 7 years of schooling but the narrative sounds like “all farmers are about 40 years old with only 7 years of schooling.
4. Table 1: Please bold the titles on the rows and columns. Instead of the means and standard deviation, I am more interested in the actual distribution of the characteristics (Supplementary materials should be provided)
5. Given the average of schooling is only 7 years, how do you make sure the farmers understand and answer the surveys properly and the results are trustworthy?
6. Line 191: Abbreviations should appear next to their narratives.
7. There are too many abbreviations in the text which make the audience lose track of reading. Please consider naming those terms differently.
8. There are too many hypotheses with abbreviations. Please consider using a figure to present these terms and their hypothesized relationships clearly.
9. Section 3.1, what are the ranges of the original values of law cognition variables? How these LCs are distributed regarding farmers’ statistical characteristics? If the results are not interesting enough to report, at least a supplementary document with those distributions should be provided to the audience.
10. It would be better for the definitions of Table 2 to appear earlier when you first defined them in the methodology section.
11. Avoid using abbreviations for the goodness of fit measures.
12. Table 4: Please consider using heatmap/bar figures with labeled numbers to highlight those values.
Author Response
First of all, I would like to thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to comment on our manuscript. We have tried to include every comment and suggestion in the revised manuscript. We hope that we have successfully addressed all of your concerns. We also hope it will surely improve the quality of our research work.
Respected reviewer, please see attachment for our point to point response to your comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
First of all, I would like to thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to comment on our manuscript. We have tried to include every comment and suggestion in the revised manuscript. We hope that we have successfully addressed all of your concerns. We also hope it will surely improve the quality of our research work.
Respected reviewer, please see attachment for our point to point response to your comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors have meticulously revised the manuscript. It is worth publication. I have one minor suggestion:
The title may be relooked as :
Role of environmental law in farmers' environment-protecting intentions and behavior based on their legal cognition: A case study of Jiangxi Province, China
Author Response
Dear reviewer
Thank you very much once again for reviewing this article. We really appreciate your efforts, and we hope this will improve the quality of the manuscript further.
Moreover, we have changed the title as suggested by you in the revised file.
Reviewer 3 Report
Thanks for the authors' efforts in revising the paper accordingly. Please reference your actual revisions in your responses. It is very hard to follow your revisions in your paper based on your response letter. And please avoid using abbreviations for your hypotheses. It is very hard for the readers to follow your abbreviations. For example, in Figure 1, please write out the full names of your abbreviations in each square. Also please try to use the nature of the hypotheses to name them instead of "H1a".
Author Response
Dear reviewer
Thank you very much once again for reviewing this article. We really appreciate your efforts, and we hope this will improve the quality of the manuscript further.
We have noted your suggestion about writing responses to reviewers comments and will definitely use it in future studies. We have also replaced Figure 1 with a new figure. We have used the full forms of all constructs along with their abbreviations as suggested by you in the revised figure. We would request that you keep the hypothesis numbering as it is, as all results have been presented according to this numbering.
