The environmental challenges facing industrial companies and governments throughout the world are numerous and complex. Most governments and industrial companies now clearly realize and embrace the paradigm that environmental issues are intertwined with social/ cultural and socioeconomic issues. whereas Sustainable development (SD) is a pattern of growth in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come (sometimes taught asELF-Environment, Local people, Future).The field of sustainable development can be conceptually broken into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability andsociopolitical sustainability. At the center of major global environmental challenges for industry are energy strategies, energy projects, other natural resource exploitation, and designing manufacturing life cycles to minimize future impacts.

The mineral resource industries (mining and oil and gas) have generally embraced the concepts of sustainable development and preservation biodiversity, but putting sustainability and biodiversity concepts into play is a “work-inprogress” for most companies. How to deploy a uniform, yet adaptive corporate environmental strategy across many geographies has become a major challenge. Environmental sustainability is the process of making sure current processes of interaction with the environment are pursued with the idea of keeping the environment as pristine as naturally possible based on ideal-seeking behavior.An "unsustainable situation" occurs when natural capital (the sum total of nature's resources) is used up faster than it can be replenished. Sustainability requires that human activity only uses nature's resources at a rate at which they can be replenished naturally. Inherently the concept of sustainable development is intertwined with the concept of carrying capacity.

Theoretically, the long-term result of environmental degradation is the inability to sustain human life. Such degradation on a global scale could imply extinction for humanity.