Sustainability is not only about addressing environmental threats, it is also about ensuring that everyone is able to enjoy the full set of human rights, in a way which does not jeopardise the rights of human beings in the future. These rights should include social and economic, civil and political, cultural and environmental rights. In other words, sustainability demands a quality of life for all which not only meets physical needs, but also meets social and cultural needs, and which is distributed equitably.

For this reason, it is now accepted that sustainable development demands action across at least three different dimensions: environmental protection, social inclusion and economic development. The relation between these three dimensions can be illustrated by the Venn diagram in Figure 1: actions in the economic realm must satisfy the needs of social inclusion, and our social demands must satisfy environmental possibilities.