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.
Authors and Publishers
Baganz, Gösta F. M.Baganz, Daniela
Land (ISSN 2073-445X) is an international, scholarly, open access journal of land use and land management published quarterly online by MDPI.
MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.
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MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.