The mitigation potential of environmental compensations: a challenge for the carbon neutrality transition

Abstract Carbon neutrality targets introduced at European level set new challenges for the built environment’s transformation. By considering the entire lifecycle of buildings, the integration of nature-based solutions (NBS) into design is increasingly necessary, but sometimes not sufficient to balance CO 2 emissions, opening up the need for compensations. Environmental systems are also subject to new anthropogenic pressures arising from urbanisation processes and the effects of climate change. In the face of an increasingly widespread compensatory model based on the carbon credits market, the paper intends to demonstrate the structural, mitigating and regenerative role of environmental compensations, when adequately planned and applied in a site-specific way, in the contexts directly and indirectly affected by interventions. The paper presents an ongoing research activity in which environmental compensations has been quantified and evaluated in their mitigation potential. The added value of the study is the provision of a methodological framework for the quantification of environmental compensations and for the measurement of the contribution of NBS to the achievement of carbon neutrality and their optimal localisation for the improvement of environmental quality.