Dear Stephan and co-authors,
Thanks a lot for your point-by-point replies to the comments made by the two anonymous reviewers and F. Salerno.

In the three reviews I recognize two basic but critical aspects that point into a similar direction outlined also in the initial comments I have made during the access review process. These two aspects are more clearly outlined below, but basically, all reviewers miss i) some additional climate change related aspects and a (qualitative) assessment by the authors of how these can impact potential permafrost evolution in the HKH; and they miss ii) some more references or examples of initiated or ongoing studies. I believe these two aspects have not yet adequately enough been taken into account. Therefore, I would like to invite you to re-think considering these two points more clearly in your article, as (i) I believe these points are a strong expectation by the readers of the article and thus this will also increase the awareness of the topic for the local researchers and authorities, and because (ii) providing some expert assessment will make the article more suited for being published in a scientific journal.

The two main points are:

1) The suggestion by F. Salerno and Reviewer 2, to include more climate and climate related studies has been followed well by the authors in the revised manuscript. However, an expert assessment which implications these changes might have for the permafrost evolution in the HKH is not provided. Or to express it in the words of Reviewer 2 ‘the chapter of climate and climate change could be expanded …. and serve as a good starting point for ‘inferring permafrost’ ”. It is fully clear, that such an ‘inferring’ will be associate with some speculations, which the authors in principle want to avoid, as written in your replies. However at the same time, I believe ‘inferring’ in the sense it is used for this article, automatically includes also some ‘speculation’?! In any case, it seems to be a clear expectation by the readers to get some thoughts from the experts (that are the authors of this article) in this regard. Moreover, and probably most importantly, with some physically plausible and carefully formulated speculations (which should be clearly marked as such) by the authors, awareness rising for the topic of permafrost by the local researchers and authorities would be much higher. A suggestion how to do this, is given by Ref 2; by ‘case-study based climate change impact assessments’. I am sure this is also in the sense of Reviewer 1, who recommended reducing the ‘text book passages’ and ‘stick to published investigation , and the map’.

2) A second point which in my view has not been adequately considered, but is clearly expected by the readers (and again helps to raise awareness…) is the point raised by Ref 2., that ongoing initiatives should be mentioned. For instance, some sentences could be included at the end of the ^Perspective’ chapter. As raised by Ref 2, ICIMOD (which is co-authoring this article) has several initiatives ongoing, and also in other programmes, initial initiatives in terms of permafrost have been started and just recently been communicated (Allen et al. 2016). The authors mention that the data that has been collected so far is not able to show anything related to PF, as these are only short term GST records and that it would be premature to show these data. I agree with this, but these activities can/should still be mentioned, also without showing any data records from these ongoing investigations.

I would very much appreciate you would consider these two points for a final version and I believe this should not generate much additional efforts for you but be rather straightforward.

Best regards,
Your guest-editor Nadine

Allen, S.K., Fiddes, J., Linsbauer, A., Randhawa, S.S., Saklani, B., Salzmann, N. 2016. Indo‐Swiss partnership initiates first local permafrost studies in the Indian Himalaya. Current Science, 11 (3), doi: 10.18520/cs/v111/i3/550-553