Compensating for Loss of Nature and Landscape in a Growing City—Berlin Case Study

By 2030, around 194,000 new dwellings will be built in Berlin, including almost 52,000 in 16 new urban districts. These and other interventions will impact the city’s nature and landscape. An important means of compensating for these losses is a land-use planning eco-account adapted to Berlin’s needs. It relies on a whole-city compensation concept consisting of three pillars: flagship projects, thematic programmes, and the integrated enhancement of existing land uses. Impacts can be offset in advance via the eco-account. The institutional and legal backgrounds, as well as the allocation of compensations to interventions and the principle of the loss–gain calculation using value points, are presented. Housing construction and its preponed compensation trigger land-use changes. Critical factors affecting this process were identified and categorised as population development, housing requirement, resulting intervention, land-use change, and preponed compensation. A modified causal loop diagram was created to visualise the interdependencies and link the polarities of the derived key variables. The challenges of compensation without a net loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as solutions for avoiding impacts to achieve the goal of no net land take, are discussed. The compensatory approach presented here could be transferred to other growing cities.