Speakers Profile - Paul Gilding










Travels From:
Sydney

Fee Range: E


He has spent over 30 years working on sustainability issues as an advisor, activist, businessman and thought leader. This long, frontline experience gives Paul deep insights into the challenges and opportunities that environmental and social trends present for society, companies and investors.

From 1975 to 1995, Paul worked as an activist on a range of social and environmental issues, becoming the International Executive Director of Greenpeace in 1992.

In 1995, Paul established Ecos Corporation (www.ecoscorporation.com), advising leading corporations on sustainability strategy, including DuPont, Ford, Anglo American, Diageo, ANZ and IAG and led that company until it was sold in 2008. Paul has developed close working relationships with a large number of CEO's and executives around the world, helping them to deepen their understanding of sustainability issues, particularly the relationship to business value and strategy and how to drive change in response. He has also maintained close links with the NGO community and helping to develop stronger partnerships, understanding and relationships with business.

From late 2005 to Nov 2007, Paul was also CEO of Ecos Corporation owned �Easy Being Green� which used carbon trading to drive mass consumer action on energy efficiency. Working with a team of over 200 staff, Easy Being Green delivered energy efficient lighting into over 600,000 NSW households. In doing so it traded the 4,300,000 tonnes of CO2 reductions it achieved and established domestic energy efficiency as a mainstream consumer opportunity in Australia. Easy Being Green's operations were suspended in Nov 2007 when the NSW carbon price collapsed and the company was sold to listed Australian green energy company Jackgreen.

Paul is an established global thought leader in sustainability. He is one of only four external members of the Global Core Faculty of the Prince of Wales's Business and the Environment Program run by Cambridge University (www.cpi.cam.ac.uk/bep) and is Chairman of the Australian program. He regularly publishes papers and has written several thought pieces that have been credited with substantially shifting the global sustainability debate. These have including co-authoring �Single Bottom Line Sustainability� (2001), which focused on the importance of a focus on shareholder value in developing corporate sustainability strategy and �Scream Crash Boom� (2005) which predicted the world would soon face a major ecological breakdown, a tipping point on climate change and a dramatic clean tech boom in response. He is a regular speaker at business conferences and corporate events around the world.

He is a Founding Director of the internet based youth charity The Inspire Foundation (www.inspire.org.au), a Founding Director of the Australian Business Community Network and is member of the Foundation Council of the Australian Davos Connection (www.ausdavos.org). He is married with 5 children.

In 1992 the World Economic Forum (WEF) appointed Paul as a Global Leader for Tomorrow, followed in 1993 with an Australia Day Award for Outstanding Achievement for services to the environment. In 1994, he was listed by Time International in its �Time's Global 100 Young Leaders for the New Millennium� and in 1997, he received the prestigious Tomorrow Magazine Environmental Leadership Awar