Review: Brief Communication: Key  papers of 20 years in Natural Hazards and 2 Earth System Sciences

By: Gain et al

This brief communication highlights 11 key papers published in NHESS over the last 20 years. The paper consists of 2 parts: the background of the initiative by the editorial board of NHESS and a concise description of the selection criteria and a second part in which the selected 11 key papers are summarised. I applaud the editorial board of NHESS with this initiative. I think it is interesting for the readers of NHESS to see the key papers and read the summary of it. I read it with pleasure and it gave me a nice insight in hazard fields I am less familiar with.

I like the initiative and I have two suggestions for improvement.

I think the authors could elaborate on the process of the selection of the 11 papers. L 46-47 are a bit too concise to my taste. The authors do not need to justify the choices but a bit more description of the process would be nice. (See for example the paper of Bloschl et al 2019 on the 23 unsolved problem in hydrology. Also here, the process how the 23 questions were selected was described in detail). It seems the editorial board selected the key papers per subject field of NHESS and then the amount roughly based on the number of papers published in that topic. Or maybe there was an internal pre-selection and then a group discussion. Anyhow, a bit more clarity will help the readers.

Second, NHESS is incredibly broad and indeed publishes state-of-the-art science but also societal impact, outreach and education. This could be stressed more in the introduction (as it seems to have been a criteria for key paper selection as well), for example with a figure. I think the word cloud could be replaced by a chord figure more emphasizing the interconnectivity and multi-discipline character of NHESS.

Minor suggestions:

L47: some. Replace by exact number: 5 of the 11 papers etc..

L70-71: I think this sentence explains a lot and should be in the first paragraph of the introduction and in the abstract.

L320: Is NHESS really an Open-access discussion platform for broader audience? Of course all could take part, but in reality, in my perception, the open discussion is still very much peer-science based and not so much a multi-stakeholder discussion platform.

L321-323: I would not mind if this proudness is explicitly mentioned in abstract and introduction as well, because this is exactly what NHESS is doing very well

Blöschl G, et al. (2019): Twenty-three Unsolved Problems in Hydrology (UPH) – a community perspective, Hydrological Sciences Journal, DOI: 10.1080/02626667.2019.1620507