PONE-D-19-27097

Identification of key sectors of water resource utilization in China from the perspective of the water footprint

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr Yue,

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Chuanwang Sun

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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'This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China under

Grant [number 71704070]; Ministry of Education for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Research Young Fund on the West and Borderland Project [number 17XJC790002], Gansu

Provincial Higher Education Research Project [number 2017B-41]; Guangdong Provincial Natural

Science Foundation of China under Grant [number 2017A030313443];Program of Lanzhou

University ofFinance and Economics under Grant [number Lzufe2018B-06]; and the Research

Project of Institute of Silk RoadEconomics, Lanzhou University of Finance and Economics under

Grant[number JYYZ201603].'

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer #1: The paper studied the China’s water by drawing on the model from Alcantara and Padilla[7]. Furthermore, the authors spent much time collecting data and writing the paper. However, the authors did not show that why the subject was selected and what problem and question of China’s water the paper would be addressed. There are some problems which would be corrected by the authors as follows:

1.Writing skill in English should be improved,Chinese characters can even be found in this paper.

2.Pay attention to the format, for example,”Chinafrom”,”footprintand”.(Page3,Line 14)

3.I suggest Figure 2 be more clear and beautiful to facilitate the readers.

4.The logic of literature review is a little confused. Are there no relevant researches on identification of key sectors of water resource utilization in China? What is the innovation of this paper?

5.The author employs 0.003 as the threshold to classify all sectors in this paper. However, the valid reasons why is 0.003 suitable fail to be provided.

6.The author mainly describes the measurement results in this paper. But further discussions on this results find no appearance.

7.The author mentions that Chinese government should design water-saving policies and control the economic growth of key sectors.However,concrete methods also can not be found.

Reviewer #2: It is interesting to analyze water resource utilization from the perspective of water footprint. It is better for the authors to conduct MAJOR REVISION.The comments are as follows.

1. what is water footprint? why did the authors analyze from the perspective of water footprint? It is better to clarify in detail.

2. What is the motivation of this paper?

3. Compared with previous studies, what are the novelties of this paper?

4. In literature reviews, it is better for the author to compare the previous papers on water resource and other resource such coal, gas and others such as:

[1] Decoupling CO2 emissions from economic growth in agricultural sector across 30 Chinese provinces from 1997 to 2014. Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 159, 15 August 2017, Pages 220-228

[2] Nonrenewable energy, renewable energy, carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth in China from 1952 to 2012. Renewable and sustainable energy reviews, ,2015, 52：680-688.

[3] The Comparison Analysis of Total Factor Productivity and Eco-efficiency in China’s Cement Manufactures. Energy Policy. 81:61-66,,2015

[4] Are Stronger Environmental Regulations Effective in Practice? The Case of China’s Accession to the WTO , Journal of Cleaner Production , (39):161-167，2013.

[10] The influencing factors of CO2 emission intensity of Chinese agriculture from 1997 to 2014, Environmental Science and Pollution Research,2018， 25:13093–13101

[5] Different impacts of export and import on carbon emissions across 7 ASEAN countries: A panel quantile regression approach，Science of the Total Environment，2019，686, 1019-1029

5.what are the differences among green water, blue water and grey water. It is better to introduce in detail.

6.The paper also compare different industry sectors. what are the differences?

7. In conclusion, please compare with previous studies. what are the similarities and differences?

The English language need to revise carefully.

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Comments.docx

PONE-D-19-27097R1

Identification of key sectors of water resource utilization in China from the perspective of the water footprint

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr Yue,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Mar 26 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

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• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Chuanwang Sun

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Editor: Please polish the language before the next submission.

Reviewer #1: It is reasonable to study key sectors of water resource utilization in China. The authors completely answered the questions from the reviewer.There two questions required to response.

1.The English of the paper need to be revised again.

2.the paper should cite more references. For example, Spatio-temporal analysis of driving factors of water resources consumption in China

Reviewer #2: Compared with the previous version, the quality of this paper has improved greatly.

I recommend to accept this paper.

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.]

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PONE-D-19-27097R2

Identification of key sectors of water resource utilization in China from the perspective of the water footprint

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr Yue,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Especially, there are still a few writing errors, I suggest that the language should be polished by the language editing service.

We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Jun 06 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

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• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'.

Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Chuanwang Sun

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Reviewer #2: compared with previous studies, the quality of this paper has improved greatly.

I recommend to accept this paper.

Reviewer #3: The article has been revised perfectly, the content is innovative, the angle is scientific and the method is feasible. Only one point: some fresh paper can be added as reference, eg:

Lu, S., Wu, X., Sun, H. et al. The multi-user evolutionary game simulation in water quality-based water source system. Environ Geochem Health (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-019-00315-5.

**********

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Identification of key sectors of water resource utilization in China from the perspective of the water footprint

PONE-D-19-27097R3

Dear Dr. Yue,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

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Chuanwang Sun

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE