Day: September 21, 2021

The Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) has unveiled its 4IR Growth and Digitalisation Strategy, which seeks to provide fully-digital public services to citizens and position the province as the “Silicon Valley of Africa”. The new strategy, announced during a virtual media conference on Friday, is spearheaded by the GautengDepartment of e-Government and the 4IR advisory panel – a 15-member panel appointed by Gauteng premier David Makhura, to support government in ensuring citizens access. Driving innovation through IoT. Sqwidnet can give you the tools to bring your ideas to life. Connect with us. Providing an outline of the 4IR strategy, advocate Pieter Holl, stream lead of the Gauteng Provincial 4IR Panel and CEO of The Innovation Hub, explained the strategy seeks to further drive the implementation of the Grow Gauteng Together (GGT) 2030 roadmap, and facilitate the adoption of new technologies to ensure all Gauteng’s citizens benefit from a fully modernised public service.

The need for reliable renewable energy is growing fast, as countries around the world—including Switzerland—step up their efforts to fight climate change, find alternatives to fossil fuels and reach the energy-transition targets set by their governments. But renewable energy can’t be incorporated into power grids efficiently until there is a way to store it on a large scale. “Most forms of renewable energy are dependent on weather conditions, which results in large fluctuations in the power they supply,” says Danick Reynard, a Ph.D. student at EPFL’s Laboratory of Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry (LEPA). “But power grids aren’t designed to manage these kinds of fluctuations.” Hydrogen, because it can supply energy consistently regardless of the weather, is now attracting growing attention.

Using a novel modelling approach, new research published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution reveals the location and intensity of key threats to biodiversity on land and identifies priority areas across the world to help inform conservation decision making at national and local levels. A team of leading researchers have produced global maps for the six main threats affecting terrestrial amphibians, birds and mammals: agriculture, hunting and trapping, logging, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. Results show that agriculture and logging are pervasive in the tropics and that hunting and trapping is the most geographically widespread threat to mammals and birds. There are sizeable continental areas in which there is more than a 50% chance that any particular amphibian, mammal or bird species is threatened by logging, hunting and trapping, agriculture, invasive species or climate change.