Paul Gilding is an Australian environmentalist, consultant, and author, known for The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (2011).

Gilding started his career as an activist in his early teens, focusing on South African apartheid and Indigenous land rights in Australia.

[2] As of 2016[update] Gilding served on the advisory board of The Climate Mobilization, a grassroots advocacy group calling for a global economic mobilisation against climate change on the scale of the American home front during World War II, with the goal of 100% clean energy and net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

[5] In The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (2011),[6] Gilding posits that the financial crisis of 2007–2008 is a symptom of human civilization growing beyond Earth's ability to support it, and is tied to the threat posed by climate change and other forms of environmental degradation.

Contrary to many environmental writers (including James Lovelock, Clive Hamilton, Richard Heinberg, and James Howard Kunstler) Gilding argues that people will work together through the climate crisis and that humanity as a whole will eventually act in time to save civilisation, albeit too late to prevent catastrophic consequences.