Review of egushpere-2022-744 Assessing agriculture’s vulnerability to drought in European pre-Alpine regions by Stephan et al.

Overview

The manuscript deals with the estimation of drought vulnerability for agricultural activities in pre-Alpine climates. The authors propose a so-called “mixed method” approach which consists in taking several vulnerability factors, normalizing them and making a weighted sum of them to derive an empirical vulnerability index. The approach is “mixed” because the choice of the factors and their weighting (in the “expert weighting” method) take into account expert advice (interviews, questionnaires, …). Indeed data availability limits significantly the applicability of the approach, as the experts can recommend factors without taking into account the real availability of datasets for the factors.

Overall, the manuscript is well written and methodologically sound. The main issue I see is that the structure of the manuscript needs improvements (in particular the discussion section), as it is not sufficiently concise. An improvement in this sense will increase the potential impact of the manuscript, if published. Hence, I suggest major revisions.

Specific comments

L23-25 - I agree that climate change is an issue. However, I believe that one should always mention uncertainties of the climate projections which are at the basis the IPCC reports and conclusions (see e.g., https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017JD027463, https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/20/3057/2020/)

L204 - Perhaps explain a bit what “political conservative vote” is.

L224 - the factor “distance to large water bodies” may not take into account the presence of water transfers between the bodies. Is this a relevant issue for the area? Perhaps a comment on this could be added, in that case

Sect. 4.1 - The vulnerability factors may be somehow statistically dependent (collinearity). I am thinking, e.g., at soil texture and water holding capacity. A comment on this is desirable. Also, how this can be prevented when involving the experts for suggesting vulnerability factors?

Sect. 5 - Discussion repeats many concepts already presented in methodology and results sections, and thus must be shortened. An important point that could be more discussed is how the approach/results can be somehow extended to other regions with different climate and socio-economic conditions.

Minor points

Equations are in unusual notation: the definition intervals of the variables are mixed with operators. Perhaps separate the two things as commonly done

Review of egushpere-2022-744 Assessing agriculture’s vulnerability to drought in European pre-Alpine regions by Stephan et al.

General Overview:

The paper entitled “Assessing agriculture’s vulnerability to drought in European pre-Alpine regions” aims at evaluate and understand agriculture’s vulnerability to drought in two different case studies in the pre-Alpine region. The methodological approach, based on recent literature on impact chains (IC) aims at integrate quantitative and qualitative information for assessing frought risk condition. It is applied in this manuscript on two case studies in Switzerland and Slovenia.

Overall, the manuscript is well written, even if:

-The results section is too much dispersive (many of the information in the text of the results paragraphs should be syntetized in tables);

-The conclusion section is too much concise, poorly explaining the practical impacts and benefits of this approach. In conclusion section, it would be also interesting to read future developments of this methodology in relaction with the “non-linearities” the authors are referring to.

My main concern about this manuscript lies in the application of the methodology. Identifying Vulnerability factors through semi-structurated interviews, produces highly site-specific results. Even in the usage of equal weighting method, vulnerability factors are different between two case studies. In expert weighting method, this difference is clearly more evident, highlighting that for some of the specific vulnerability factors (Figure 3), as reported (in Figure S1) unfortunately are not available information (such as regarding irrigation infrastructures).

In order to built a strenght methodology based on semi-structurated interviews, information should be collected on a wider data sample (with numerous case studies) otherwise findings are too site-specific, as it is understandable that for their specific characteristics, the two case studies have different vulnerability factors, but without a wider comparison it is difficult to identify main common ones. This represents a weakness of the manuscript.

In addiction, lack of data regarding the management strategies doesn’t help, as they can represent a key point for testing the methodology.

From this perspective, scientific soundess of the whole manuscript should be improved, even if it represents an interesting an useful piece of knowledge specifically for both case studies.

Some Minor Remarks:

• Figure S1 in supplmement material: please, improve the quality of this figure.
• Figure S2 – S3: Text in legend is too small, please plot it bigger.