General Remarks The paper is dealing with the social acceptability of rural population and landholders towards the preservation of wetlands which are quasi used for cultivation-livestock purpose in an Australian case study.

Further, the paper makes an effort to deploy some association of the participants’ response on wetlands value (i.e. whether benefits outweigh cost of cropping or draining wetlands) to different socio-economic, cultural, environmental and many other components.

However, as of now, there is a big confusion on the methodology, results and discussion sections. There are numerous theorems coming out without adequate justification, there is a mixture of results with the methodology while discussion is rather poorly described.

More details are given in a section-wise manner follow.

Abstract P. 3 (counting PFD’s pages) Lines 23-26: This is an unclear sentence, pls clarify.

P.3. Lines 26-30: Again, this is an unclear and too long sentence, pls rephrase.

Introduction P.4 Lines 7-11: There is no connection with the wetlands' related pars above with the climate change, pls rephrase.

P. 4. Lines 38-42: Maybe you should mention that before in the manuscript when you refer to the insufficiency of national legislation.

P. 4. Lines 56-58: Though this may be the research question, however the preceding arguments are moreover focused on the legislative aspects without supporting the normative background.

P. 5 Line 1: It's better to make some introduction before entering new terminology/theorems.

Background P. 5 Lines 17-18: Again, pls seen my previous comment.

P. 5 Lines 27-35: This is major argument, insufficiently explained to the moment. Pls adequately support why you ended up in this hypothesis.

P. 5 Lines 55-59: This is pretty much all of human behavior. Pls clarify it in a better manner.

P. 6 Lines 1-6: Why choosing VBN among other methods? What's the actual difference with other methods?

P. 6 Lines 7-10: Doesn't that repeat the above?

P. 6 Section 2.2 Risk Interpretation: This section is very loosely connected with the entire manuscript except for the last par which also offers some blurred meanings.

P. 6 Line 22: What does that actually mean?

P. 7 Lines 11-18: This seems to be also part of the research question and should come quite in advance.

P. 7 Lines 23-24: Are you sure about that? I went across for instance randomly to some literature and there are many studies dealing with the economic value of wetlands to Australia by using stated preferences' approaches (e.g. https://core.ac.uk/download/files/333/11034657.pdf). This is in a sense the social acceptability of people interpreted in economic terms.

P. 7 Lines 41-42: This is also another part of the research question coming out and should be presented beforehand.

Approach P. 7 Section 3 Approach: If Section 3 refers to approach what's the background then refers to? My understanding is that Section 2 devotes much text on general description by sporadically incorporating methodological elements.

P. 8 Lines 26-30: You mentioned before that rainfall is low, pls clarify.

P. 9 Lines 43-53: This is part of the methodology which is fragmentally presented in Section 2 and 3. I suggest merging this in one section devoted to methodology and describe such arguments well in advance.

P. 10 Table 1: So, these are the topics that the farmers where queried on. However, later on the results I can't figure it out, pls clarify.

P. 10 Lines 43-46: This pops up a bit out of the blue like in the case where you presented risk in Section 2. You should link it with the above and explain how these items were selected.

P. 11 Lines 16-19: This has been already mentioned.

P. 11 Table 3: I am lost here, how’s the rating (1-5) related with the risk and the values?

P. 11 Table 4: How are they related with Table no.1?

P. 12 Lines 26-28: Is this another new method proposed? And what that's about? pls clarify.

Results P. 12 Table 5: This is in a sense all your resume about the non-acceptability of the respondents. Given the 36% of uncertainty I'd put more emphasis on this factor and its interpretation.

P. 13 Lines 7-16: These are basic statistical indicators, no need to elaborate.

P. 13 Table 6: I don't quite understande the components you correlate with. Is it between the ones believing of being social acceptable or unacceptable?

P. 13 Table 7: Pls see comment above.

P. 16 Table 10: I am not sure that there is a need for all these descriptive tables in the text. You may merge most of them and present the highlights. I am also a bit surprise that nearly all the correlations are statistically significant. Are you sure that statistically was objective?

P. 17 Lines 42-47: It's understood what you're trying to achieve here but the presentation and arguments are so poor to justify the undertaking. Also, what kind of multivariate analysis you used? There are plenty of them and should justify the reasoning for using the specific one.

P. 18 4.3 Exploring the ‘unsure’ cohort: This seems to be now mentioned in the manuscript without prior information in the methodology. Also see the above comment on the poor support of such a statistical analysis.

5 Discussion and conclusions

P. 21 Lines 38-47: There is no need to repeat previous statements.

P. 21-22: Up to here, this part resembles more to reporting of the results in brief. Discussion should be about reasoning your results, refer to implications and provide some arguments on this purpose.

P. 23 Lines 22-25: I couldn't quite find this in the results. The observations should come out from the study findings, not generic arguments unless adequately supported.