General comments

Expanding the use of scientific knowledge in decision making processes is critical, especially in the case of policy initiatives and legislation. The integration of paleoclimate research into these processes is a key knowledge asset especially for crafting policies and initiatives for climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. This manuscript is a valuable addition to science-policy communication literature in its perspective on the integration of paleoclimate research and data into policy decision making, and the exploration of the existing barriers and opportunities for this integration.  

Specific Comments:

1. In sections 3 and 4, the authors mention how decision makers use grey literature from governmental and non-governmental organizations to inform their decision making. Other literature has discussed this trend in the use of non-peer reviewed scholarly publications by policymakers. The authors might consider adding some background information to the manuscript to show that these trends from their survey results align with prior research. Here are some references that may provide some insight for this discussion:
   
   
   
   Lawrence, A., Houghton, J., Thomas, J., and Weldon, P., 2014, Where is the evidence: realising the value of grey literature for public policy and practice, Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved from http://apo.org.au/research/where-evidence-realising-value-grey-literature-public-policy-and-practice
   
   
   
   MacDonald, B. H., Ross, J. D., Soomai, S. S., and Wells, P. G., 2015, How information in grey literature informs policy and decision-making: A perspective on the need to understand the processes. The Grey Journal, 11:1, 7-16.
2. In Section 2 (Methods), the authors mention that the requirements for decision makers were that they “worked on some aspect of climate within their team”. Did the decision makers specify which aspects of climate they worked on? If so, it might be useful for the non-climate scientist audience to understand the breadth of climate-related expertise of the decision makers. Same goes for the paleoclimate researchers (“they have research expertise on some aspect of palaeoclimate”).
3. The authors discuss policy training as a potential opportunity for academics. In the UK, do academic fellowships in policy making governmental agencies exist? If these opportunities do exist in the UK, it may be good to include this information as part of Section 4.3.3.
4. The authors acknowledge potential bias from their positionality when doing the qualitative coding. Given the advancements in technology, especially with respect to artificial intelligence, it may be useful to consider comparing the results from qualitative coding of the transcripts from a large language model to that of the authors to see if there are significant differences in the coding results. This may be outside the scope of this manuscript; however, it could be mentioned as a way to help identify and potentially minimize positionality bias in the interpretation and analysis of the data.

Technical corrections:

There were a few sentences that seemed to be incomplete:

L46:  When palaeoclimate evidence is not considered, our understanding of climate variability is constrained to only the last ~150 years, a period that captures neither the full range of natural variability nor the frequency of rare but high impact climate events which may lead to.

L134: Building on the broader literature on science-policy barriers and facilitators outlined above, recent investigations into the barriers and facilitators of palaeo science in general (Allen et al., 2025), and palaeoecology specifically (Siggery et al., 2023)

General Comments

The aim of the paper is to examine why palaeoclimate data is underutilised by UK decision makers. The authors interviewed policymakers and advisors to identify potential barriers to the uptake of this information. They acknowledge that they faced challenges in carrying out their interviews due to somewhat low response rates to their emails, possibly due to the interviewees perceptions that they could not contribute knowledge. The paper is well organised and is overall a valuable contribution to this field of study.

Specific Comments

Abstract: Lines 13-14 – I’m don’t think net zero policies are a good example of how humans are framing adaptation strategies. Net zero more often is part of the discussion around mitigation rather than adaptation.

Introduction: I agree with community comment CC1 that the introduction could benefit from shortening or at least breaking up into sections.

Findings: Whilst the authors discuss how response rate were low; I couldn’t see in the methods or the findings exactly how many people responded to their interview requests. Perhaps I missed something obvious, but it would be nice to see it mentioned in the outset of the findings.

Discussions: Figure 2 is an incredibly useful figure. I was somewhat surprised that scientific journal articles ranked lower than government websites. I wonder if the arrows could be reduced to just one that says “Relevance and Reliability” given that they are both pointing in the same direction.

Line 441 – the authors refer to there being “several barriers that limit the effective transfer of knowledge…” It would be nice if they could summarise them or give examples of the kind of barriers that exist.

Conclusions: Under study reflections the authors discuss potential further work. I would add to this that it would be interesting to hear from decision makers in other countries. I’d be especially keen to see if these views are held by European decision makers given that UK decision makers often obtain their funding from European sources.  

Technical Corrections

Page 6, line 140: delete “this” from “To our knowledge this there…”