Earth Day arrives next week. Amid global distractions, a local public forum plots new strategies for tackling climate change.

The World Meteorological Organization, a special agency of the United Nations, reported that 2024 was the warmest year on record, capping a decade in which every year ranked among the 10 hottest ever measured. Research based on six international datasets, shows the planet likely exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels for the first full calendar year — a threshold that places the long-term goals of the multinational Paris Agreement in grave danger.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.