While compliance with regulatory requirements remains the most common driver of business sustainability, profitability and other strategic factors are increasingly significant. A sustainable business is more robust and more efficient; it appeals to customers' changing values, strengthens relationships with suppliers and positions the brand as a good corporate citizen.

Several signals warn that the planet's present environmental crisis is not a temporary "bottle neck" due to particular dynamics of problems that have overcome temporary the human response capability. The modification of the earth's atmosphere on an unknown scale since million of years, the global collapse of some fisheries, and the increase of the contemporary rate of species extinction in a factor superior to one thousand with respect of the prehistoric rate, seem to indicate that the growing human activity is reaching some ultimate natural threshold.