Dear authors:

Thank you for submitting your responses to referee comments. Both referees found advantages in your study focusing on East African vegetation under changing ENSO regime. However, they also put up critical questions, especially on the use of sole RCP8.5 scenario. Your justification seems reasonable for me (although I do not agree that RCP8.5 is the more plausible scenario amongst the alternatives), but many readers would have the same question. Finally, I conclude that the manuscript needs major revision on the basis of referee comments and your replies. Concerning the title of manuscript, I suppose that title A with slight modification “Future changes in El Niño-Southern Oscillation regimes and its impacts on East African vegetation under RCP8.5 warming scenario” looks better. Alternatively, you may change to a better one. I am looking forward to receiving a revised manuscript.

Dear Authors:

Thank you for sending the revised manuscript. I studied your response and annotated manuscript. The new title seems more appropriate to represent the work in this manuscript, and you explicitly declared that you focused on the RCP8.5 scenario. Perhaps, the two reviewers can be slightly disappointed that you did not add another reference scenario (e.g., RCP2.6 and RCP4.5). Nevertheless, in 4.3, I confirmed that you justified the selection of RCP8.5 in a reasonable way and so recommend accepting this manuscript for publication. (However, if you are planning to conduct a similar research, I still recommend using two or more scenarios.)