Lucas Morgenstern

Lucas Morgenstern is a manager on the Strategic Planning and Finance team within Earth for Life at WWF-US, which provides conservation planning, financial planning, and sustainable financing expertise to initiatives that permanently finance networks of protected and conserved areas and support sustainable livelihoods for the communities living in and around them.

Lucas works with partner organizations and governments across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa to set conservation goals, design activities, identify baseline funding and financing needs, structure sustainable financing mechanisms, and monitor results. He currently supports Belize's PFP, where he leads financial modeling across the program's protected areas, fisheries, coastal resilience, livelihoods, and sustainable finance pillars. He also serves as the programmatic focal point for Brazil's ARPA Comunidades, supporting private donor reporting. His work spans PFP feasibility assessments in Paraguay, South Africa, and Thailand as well as Indigenous-led bison restoration in the US Northern Great Plains.

Brazilian by birth, Lucas grew up sailing with his family and mountaineering with friends, and came to conservation by way of the private sector, with roles at IBM and HSBC and three years in consulting at EY.

He holds a Master of Environmental Management from Duke University, where his thesis applied geospatial analysis to update the Jaguar Corridor Initiative in Colombia, and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil.

Education

• MEM – Ecosystem Science & Conservation, Duke University
• BBA – Business Administration, Federal University of Parana

Areas of Expertise

• Wildlife Conservation
• Area-based Conservation
• Tropical Ecology
• Science-based Management