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Bill Ulfelder
Bill Ulfelder leads The Nature Conservancy in New York with approximately 75,000 members. Since joining the Conservancy in New York in 2009, The Nature Conservancy has conserved over 100,000 acres and launched in New York City the Conservancy’s first-ever comprehensive urban conservation program, focused on the role of nature and natural defenses in making the city’s people and wildlife more resilient in a climate changing world.
Bill joined The Nature Conservancy in 1995, working on community-based conservation in the Peruvian Amazon and Ecuadorian Andes. In 1997, Bill was appointed Peru Program Director, where he oversaw the conservation efforts with Peruvian public and private partners and helped negotiate a $10.5 million debt-for-nature swap to provide $10.5 for Peruvian protected areas in exchange for Peruvian debt relief. In 2003 he moved to Flagstaff, Arizona where he served as the Conservancy’s Northern Arizona Director, overseeing landscape scale forest conservation and restoration efforts with the US Forest Service. Subsequently, as the Conservancy’s Eastern Colorado Director, Bill oversaw grasslands conservation of the Western High Plains and led numerous partnership efforts with ranchers, state agencies, the US Army and Air Force and other NGOs. Additionally, Bill served as the Conservancy’s interim Central Caribbean Director, leading conservation efforts in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and Puerto Rico for much of 2008, including launching a free trade and conservation project, at that time the Conservancy’s largest project in the region. He holds dual master’s degrees in Forest Resource Management and Natural Resource Economics & Policy from the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, is a Fulbright Scholar and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a prestigious Morehead-Cain Scholarship.