Cris B. Liban
Chief Sustainability Officer,
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro)

Cris B. Liban is Chief Sustainability Officer at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro). He has worked at LA Metro since 2003 and has grown his agency’s environmental and sustainability practice into one of the most progressive and forward-looking in the country, implementing 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 LA County. Many of these are to be completed in time for the 2028 Olympics.
Dr. Liban holds concurrent appointments on the State of California Green Bonds Development Committee, Los Angeles County Beach Commission and the City of Los Angeles Board of Transportation Commissioners and is lead in writing the transportation chapter of the forthcoming Fifth National Climate Assessment (https://www.globalchange.gov/nca5). He held previous political appointments as a member of the US EPA’s National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology and the California Climate Safe Infrastructure Working Group, and wasrecent chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on Sustainability where he led the effort to develop a global sustainable infrastructure standard; and guidance documents that incorporate climate science into both the practice of civil engineering and procurement and execution of sustainable infrastructure. Now co-chair of the American Public Transportation Association Sustainability Commitment Committee, he conceptualized and co-led formation of the International Coalition for Sustainable infrastructure in 2019, which has become a global coalition of almost 200,000 engineers and more than 10,000 cities.
Cris Liban also received in 2016 the Philippines’ highest civilian honor for Filipinos living overseas and was awarded the Engineering-News Record (ENR) 2020 Award of Excellence for his singular focus on building a sustainable transportation system that is also economically and socially beneficial to all levels of society. Elected to the National Academy of Construction in 2021, he is a Professional Engineer in California and has degrees in geology, civil engineering and environmental science and engineering.