Citation: Rugani, B.; Osset, P.; Blanc, O.; Benetto, E. Environmental Footprint Neutrality Using Methods and Tools for Natural Capital Accounting in Life Cycle Assessment. Land 2023, 12, 1171. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/land12061171 Academic Editor: Muhammad Shafique Received: 2 April 2023 Revised: 24 May 2023 Accepted: 29 May 2023 Published: 1 June 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). land Review Environmental Footprint Neutrality Using Methods and Tools for Natural Capital Accounting in Life Cycle Assessment Benedetto Rugani 1,2, * , Philippe Osset 3 , Olivier Blanc 3 and Enrico Benetto 1 1 Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), Environmental Research & Innovation (ERIN) Department, RDI Unit on Environmental Sustainability Assessment and Circularity (SUSTAIN)—Maison de l’Innovation, 5 Avenue Des Hauts-Fourneaux, Esch-sur-Alzette, L-4362 Luxembourg, Luxembourg; enrico.benetto@list.lu 2 National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Research Institute on Terrestrial Ecosystems (IRET), Via G. Marconi 2, I-05010 Porano, Italy 3 SCORELCA—Campus LyonTech La Doua, 66 Boulevard Niels Bohr, CS 52132, CEDEX, F-69603 Villeurbanne, France; philippe.osset@scorelca.org (P.O.); olivier.blanc@scorelca.org (O.B.) * Correspondence: benedetto.rugani@cnr.it Abstract: Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) is becoming a reference tool for an increasing number of organizations transitioning towards environmental impact neutrality. However, one NCA technique applicable to all types of actors (individual, community, company, etc.) is missing because of the lack of consensus on how to quantify both their environmental impacts and dependencies on ecosystems. A coupled systematic and non-systematic review of the grey and scientific literature is performed here to (i) make an extensive review of state-of-the-art NCA methods, identifying their current utilization and limitations, and (ii) discern prospects about the challenges of integrating an Ecosystem Service Accounting in Life Cycle Assessment (ESA-LCA). While NCA methods can extensively evaluate the supply of ES, they tend to disregard the quantification of environmental impacts that imply a demand for ES. The ESA-LCA approach is identified as a robust solution to balance supply and demand of ecosystem services in NCA, allowing private and public actors to quantify their distance from impact neutrality targets. A novel definition of NC(A) in LCA is also formulated to support these future efforts, promoting a Mitigation Hierarchy-based strategy to avoid, minimize, restore, and offset impacts, and outlining a roadmap for practitioners to apply ESA-LCA across multiple economic sectors. Keywords: biodiversity; ecosystem service; environmental accounting; environmental sustainability; mitigation hierarchy; Natural Capital Protocol; natural resource; life cycle assessment (LCA); System of Environmental–Economic Account (SEEA); supply and demand 1. Introduction Human well-being depends on multiple goods and services provided by nature and is associated with the stock of renewable and non-renewable resources available in the atmosphere, land, and oceans. All this is known as “Natural Capital” (NC), that is the environmental assets and natural resource stocks that provide ecological goods, flows, and services necessary to sustain life on Earth [1–3]. By driving many production systems that are underneath human economies, NC has inherently a pivotal societal value. With a seminal paper published in 1997, Costanza and co-authors launched the concept of ecosystem services (ES) by valuing NC in monetary terms [4]. This work represented a radical turning point in that it introduced the notion of ES within mainstream economics, providing a global monetary estimate of the value of ES generated by the Earth’s biomes, comparable to the world’s gross domestic product. A proliferation of studies took place in the following years (e.g., [5–8]), leading to the upsurge of a new field of ‘natural capital’ research, namely that of ecosystem services and biodiversity (e.g., [9–14]). Land 2023, 12, 1171. https://doi.org/10.3390/land12061171 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land