Join us to discuss how cities can navigate today’s challenges and opportunities around reducing emissions and improving residents’ mobility.
A recording of the webinar is available below.
About this Event
As U.S. cities work to reduce emissions and support the mobility of all their residents, they are also navigating new transportation patterns at this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and an influx of federal infrastructure funding. Jon A. Carnegie (Rutgers University) moderated a conversation between Cris Liban (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority) and Priya Zachariah (City of Houston) about how planners and policymakers can support a transition to more equitable, lower-emissions urban transportation systems amidst this dynamic context.
Climate Conversations: Pathways to Action is a monthly webinar series from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that aims to convene high-level, cross-cutting, nonpartisan conversations about issues relevant to national policy action on climate change.
Participant Bios
Cris Liban serves as Chief Sustainability Officer at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), where he has grown his agency’s environmental and sustainability practice into the most progressive and forward-looking in the country and implemented over 150 sustainability initiatives to date. He is working to ensure that $140B in capital projects that are programmed for the next 40 years are sustainable, climate-adapted, and resilient for the more than 10 million people of Los Angeles County. He is currently the Transportation Chapter Lead of the forthcoming Fifth National Climate Assessment.
Priya Zachariah is the Chief Resilience and Sustainability Officer for the City of Houston leading the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability – a newly combined office focused on the implementation of Resilient Houston and Houston’s Climate Action Plan. She has a bachelor’s in architecture from India and a master’s in urban and regional planning from UCLA. She has over twenty years of experience in design and project management, program development, land use, and transit planning and development, having worked in south and southeast Asia and the Middle East before moving to the United States. While she is not a native Houstonian, she and her family have lived in Houston for over eleven years and consider themselves to be Houstonians for life.
Jon A. Carnegie is executive director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University and an adjunct member of the faculty at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers. Mr. Carnegie has more than 30 years of experience in the fields of land use and transportation planning and policy at the municipal, county and regional level. His research interests include transportation resilience and climate change adaptation, transportation equity, and how transportation intersects with other areas of planning and public policy.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the conversation are those of the participants and do not necessarily represent the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
