Fabio Teixeira

Cleaners, couriers and cabbies from around the world are creating new apps to better balance their gig work with the chores of motherhood and marriage, skirting sexist algorithms that penalise women who put home before work.

From Brazil to South Africa, female gig workers are on a mission to design, build and own their own apps to counter what they see as entrenched sexism on existing job platforms.

When 46-year-old data collector Mfanzile Msibi and his team started mapping slums more than a decade ago near Johannesburg, they realised that tens of thousands of slum dwellers were unaccounted for in government records.

The local Ekurhuleni government, a city east of Johannesburg, had recognised 102 slum settlements in 2009, but the Informal Settlement Network (ISN), a South African social movement, found that over a dozen communities were missing from records.

For Indigenous leader Zenivaldo Bezerra, listening to the "enchanted" - ancestral spirits - required waiting until the dead of night for absolute silence in his rural community in northeastern Brazil.

But a quiet night has become rare for the Pankararu, a group of about 7,500 Indigenous people in Pernambuco state, because of the hum from 52 wind turbines built on the surrounding savannah without their consent.

When Chilean university professor Diego Martínez asked his 50 students if they had used ChatGPT to help with an engineering assignment, he was surprised to find that every one of them had.

The popular AI chatbot can generate coherent prose, including essays, stories, summaries, legal text, and even poetry about virtually any subject in response to users' questions and is designed to mimic a human conversation.

Brazilian lawmakers - many connected to the nation's powerful agriculture lobby - this week approved bills that would weaken or reverse human rights and environmental policies established by the new government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Bill 490, which limits the recognition of new Indigenous territories, was endorsed by Brazil's lower house of Congress on Tuesday but it still requires approval by the Senate and Lula.

Brazil and Colombia have put the brakes on Amazon deforestation during the last year, but must now tackle criminal groups and bolster law enforcement to lock in tentative progress to protect the world's largest rainforest, researchers say.

Deforestation in Brazil fell 68% in April from the previous year - a significant decline since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January after pledging to reverse surging Amazon destruction under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.

Companies with Brazilian forest concessions would be allowed to generate carbon credits under a bill passed by Congress this week that marks a "first step" in regulating the country's voluntary carbon market.

Private firms have shown little interest in a government program that leases publicly owned forests for sustainable logging, but the legislation could boost the concessions' appeal with investors by generating an additional revenue stream.

Oséias Mendes da Costa, a chatty 44-year-old, has dedicated his life to coffee in Minas Gerais state - Brazil's largest producer of the crop - where he worked for more than 10 years at a cooperative of coffee growers.

Now, he's striving to make coffee production greener.

Alongside the Brazilian Amazon's vast soy and cattle ranching economy - a major driver of deforestation - sits an older, more sustainable system of families and cooperatives producing forest products including the palm fruit açaí, rubber and pharmaceutical ingredients.

That "bioeconomy", with its legions of small producers, including Indigenous communities, receives just a fraction of the flood of investment pouring into expanding soy and cattle.

Short-staffed, stripped of its powers and led by a police officer, Brazil's Funai Indigenous affairs agency became a symbol of Jair Bolsonaro's dismantling of Amazon protections.

Now, as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva seeks to reverse his predecessor's policies and rebuild Funai, staff say he must act quickly to address widespread exhaustion and frustration among the agency's depleted workforce.