Although there is no one agreed upon definition, in this guide, business sustainability refers to:

Business models and managerial decisions that create value over the short, medium and long term, based on mutually beneficial interactions between the company's value chain and the social and environmental systems on which it depends.^[1]

This definition of business sustainability recognizes that all business takes place within the context of a set of planetary boundaries^[2] and social thresholds^[3] . Businesses operate as part of a nested system bounded by the social and environmental systems that surround them.

Embedding sustainability is about integrating sustainability across the business, to the point that it is no longer considered an 'add-on' but simply 'the way we do business'.