Central America drought turning into humanitarian crisis

UN News Centre: A prolonged drought in Central America is turning into a humanitarian crisis for nearly two and a half million people affected by food insecurity in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned today. Briefing the press in Geneva today, OCHA’s Jens Laerke said most of those affected are subsistence farmers, farm labourers and low-income families.

In Honduras and Guatemala, up to 75 per cent of maize and bean crop has been lost and thousands of cattle had died. In the coming months, food insecurity is expected to get worse as families deplete their food stocks.

In Guatemala, the Government declared a state of public calamity in 16 departments in August and by October, 30,000 families had finished their food stocks. Those families were today in deep distress, said Mr. Laerke.

In the so-called “dry corridor” in eastern Guatemala, a joint Government/UN/NGO (non-governmental organization) assessment found that one in four households suffered from moderate or severe malnutrition. Children under five, pregnant women and female-headed households are most vulnerable, said Mr. Laerke.

In Honduras the Government had declared a state of emergency in the drought affected western areas, as crop loss had reached up to 75 per cent. Assessments also found high levels of malnutrition in children under five. An emergency assessment in September found that nearly 20,000 children were malnourished as a consequence of the long drought, said Mr. Laerke.

In El Salvador, the Ministry of Environment and Natural resources had reported that the country was experiencing its worst drought since 1977. The authorities said that in hotspot areas in the eastern part of the country, more than 80 per cent of farmers reported that they have lost all of their crops....

The Guatemalan highlands, shot by Pati Gaitan Pati Gaitan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Deforestation of Central America rises as Mexico's war on drugs moves south

Frederic Saliba in the Guardian (UK): According to Kendra McSweeney: "Drug trafficking is causing an ecological disaster in Central America." McSweeney, a geographer at Ohio State University, is the co-author of a recent report on the little-known phenomenon of "narco-deforestation" that is destroying huge tracts of rainforest that are already under threat from other quarters.

Viewed from the air, the tropical forests of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua are scarred with landing strips and roads built illegally by the narco-traffickers for transporting drugs to the US, the leading world market. "These protected ecological zones have become the hub for South American cocaine," according to McSweeney, who stresses that the annual deforestation rate in Honduras more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2011, a boom-period for drug trafficking. In 2011 alone, 183 sq km of forest was destroyed in the east of the country, including in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, an endangered Unesco world heritage site. This was in addition to the pre-existing problem of forest destruction due to illegal logging.

The wave of devastation has been moving south down the American continent, as drug crackdowns have taken force in Mexico. This is known as the efecto cucaracha, or cockroach effect, with reference to the survival instinct this creature has of seeking refuge next door as soon as it has been of chased out of one house. In the Laguna del Tigre national park in north-east Guatemala, deforestation has increased by between 5% and 10% in the past seven years. That coincides with the war against drug trafficking launched at the end of 2006 by the former Mexican president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), with backing from the US.

Take the powerful Sinaloa cartel. When it was headed by Joaquin Guzmán, alias El Chapo, before his arrest on 22 February, the Mexican mafia extended its influence in Central America via local gangs. For McSweeney: "Narco-deforestation enables cartels to occupy territory to the detriment of their competitors. If that continues, the entire Mesoamerican [Central American] biological corridor, which stretches from Panama to Mexico, will be affected by tree felling."...

Burned jungle in Mexico, shot by Jami Dwyer, public domain

Guatemala: Adapting to climate change

Tico Times (Costa Rica): Guatemala is one of the top 10 countries most affected by climate change and one of the most vulnerable to natural disasters, according to the Global Climate Risk Index. The Central American nation’s geographical position, straddling three tectonic plates and two oceans, leaves it prone to tropical storms, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes, which have been occurring with increasing frequency over the past decade.

In 2005, Hurricane Stan swept through Guatemala leaving more than 1,500 people dead, 500,000 victims and damages estimated at $989 million. In 2010, Pacaya Volcano erupted, scattering volcanic ash and debris across Guatemala City, bringing economic life in the capital of 1.5 million residents to a standstill. Two days later, Tropical Storm Agatha hit, leaving an equally expensive cleanup operation.

“[Natural disasters] have had serious consequences for the country: loss of infrastructure due to landslides and floods, loss of harvest causing food shortages and loss of natural space,” said José Luis Rivera, coordinator of Guatemala’s Climate Change Unit, an initiative set up by the Environment and Natural Resources Ministry. “In the last decade we have suffered dry spells and floods that have caused loss of life and severe socioeconomic damage, in addition to putting rural communities, especially women, children and indigenous populations at risk.”

Natural disasters like these 2011 floods in the department of Escuintla, 100 km south of Guatemala City, are becoming increasingly common in Guatemala, one of the world's 10 countries most affected by climate change. Johan Ordóñez/AFP

But it’s not just Guatemala’s geographical location that leaves it susceptible: Poor housing, high malnutrition and unemployment also conspire to make the country’s inhabitants more vulnerable, with indigenous communities and farmers among the most affected…

Migration not always a way to adapt

IRIN: As the impact of climate change unfolds, many have predicted forbidding scenarios of millions of impoverished people flooding into often affluent countries. Yet a ground-breaking study released on 28 November reveals a more nuanced relationship between climate variability and migration, which could provide insight into how events might transpire in the coming years.

The study, carried out by Care International and the UN University (UNU) in eight countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, reveals that in nearly all instances where rains have become too scarce for farming, people have migrated - but within the national borders.

The project also considered possible future scenarios in Tanzania, where even scarcer rains over the next 25 years were projected to double migration from vulnerable households.  The project’s researchers hope their findings will inform the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks, currently taking place in Doha, by persuading participants to speed up efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and develop effective policies to adapt to rising temperatures.

The three-year research project, Where the rain falls: climate change, hunger and human mobility, covered over 1,300 households and 2,000 individuals in Bangladesh, India, Ghana, Guatemala, Peru, Tanzania, Thailand and Vietnam. 

...It is one of the first empirical efforts to explore how poor households use migration as a risk management strategy to deal with climate stressors and food insecurity. The study also offers insight into how households adjust their behaviour in the face of these changes, which could inform how policymakers support rural communities....

Young people in Guatemala in 1980, shot by Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

A battle for a vital Mayan forest

William Allen in Yale Environment 360:  The 200-foot summit of Temple IV in the ancient Maya city of Tikal provides a spectacular view of Central America’s largest expanse of intact rainforest. ...This lowland forest is the heart of the Maya Biosphere Reserve of northern Guatemala, a 2.1 million-hectare (5.2 million-acre) sanctuary that covers 19 percent of the country and contains roughly 60 percent of its protected area. The UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve sustains a wide array of biodiversity, most notably the last remaining population of a key subspecies of scarlet macaw.

But this magnificent creature and others that inhabit the reserve — jaguars, pumas, Guatemalan black howler monkeys, Baird’s tapirs — are being pressured not just by the standard threats common to tropical regions, such as illegal logging, fires, and commercial hunting. Even more virulent forces are gnawing away at the Maya Biosphere Reserve, including Mexican drug cartels that cut into the forest to build airstrips to transport drugs, Salvadoran gangs that carve out huge cattle ranches to launder drug money, and Chinese organized crime groups moving their illegal logging network toward the reserve to supply Asian markets with prime tropical hardwoods.

As a result, this natural and cultural treasure — the heart of the Selva Maya, a forest spanning the borders of Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize — has in recent years effectively been cut in two. The western side, which includes two of the reserve’s five national parks and is bordered on the west and the north by Mexico, is under siege, according to Guatemalan park officials. The eastern part of the reserve, where Tikal rises above the jungle canopy and which borders Belize, is lush and intact.

“The story of the Maya Biosphere Reserve has increasingly become a tale of two reserves — one of conservation successes and one of failures,” says Roan McNab, director of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Guatemala program. McNab is a pivotal figure in a coalition of Guatemalan and foreign conservation groups battling to preserve the eastern half of the reserve and claw back some of the denuded lands of the western sector....

In northern Guatemala's Tikal archaeological site surrounded by the Maya Biosphere Reserve, ruined Mayan Temples 1, 2, 3 and 5. Shot by chensiyuan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Guatemala's palm industry leaves locals contemplating an uncertain future

Myles Estey in the povermatters blog at Guardian (UK): ...A dozen dirt-floored homes dot Semochán, in the northern Guatemalan state of Petén. The predominantly indigenous Q'eqchi residents harvest maize and beans from small plots of family-owned land. But over the past decade, the semi-tropical climate and flat terrain has attracted the interest of palm growers. Hoping to cash in on the growing global demand for palm oil (used mainly in commercial baked goods), they have reportedly bought more than 20,000 hectares of arable land in the region.

"They have encircled us and we no longer have the right to cross our community," says Sandra*, who – since former neighbours sold the plots between her own and the town itself – must cross an oil palm plantation in order to reach the land she legally owns. An agreement has been reached to allow her access, but she fears the plantation workers, far from honouring it, will continue to intimidate both her and other women in the community with threats of eviction.

"They came on my parcel, and they asked me: 'Are you going to sell your land?' I told them I wouldn't," she said of her latest conversation. "They told me that, someday, I would find myself not enjoying my land any more, no matter what. That is how things were left." Residents in several nearby villages are uneasy about the future of their land, with many worried that the environmental side-effects associated with the palm plantations will render it worthless.

Santos Natalio Chic, an investigator with the national commission on displaced people in Guatemala, believes that – beyond the intimidation – company representatives have intentionally misled residents, whether by claiming that floods will render their land useless or offering spurious guarantees of lifelong employment. "You never see their promises," says Chic. "They say: 'This will bring development to the communities,' when really what it means is more poverty."...

Patchwork of cultivated fields on mountain slope in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Shot by the pink slip, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Boy dies in rains in Guatemala

Fox News Latino: A 6-year-old boy became the first fatality of the 2012 rainy season in Guatemala, the Conred emergency management agency said Wednesday. The child died Tuesday when a mudslide tore through a home in Choacorral, a hamlet in the northwestern province of Quiche.

Two other people were injured in the same incident, Conred said, without providing further details. Elsewhere, two families were forced to leave their flooded home in the town of San Jose Pinula, 22 kilometers (13 miles) southeast of the capital, Conred said.

The torrential rains in Guatemala are due to a low-pressure system located south of the Gulf of Tehuantepec in the Pacific Ocean, meteorological officials said. Guatemala's rainy season begins in May and runs through November.

The United Nations says Guatemala is particularly vulnerable to climate change-related flooding because of its abundance of rivers....

The highlands in Guatemala, near Antigua, shot by Pati Gaitan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Pakistan and Guatemala hardest hit by weather extremes in 2010

Germanwatch.org: While the UN climate summit at Durban has started under the impression of severe local thunderstorms, the climate and development organization Germanwatch publishes its Global Climate Risk Index (CRI) for the seventh time. The index focuses on countries especially affected by weather extremes such as floodings and storms in 2010 and during the past twenty years. The Global Climate Risk Index is based on data collected in the worldwide renowned database at MunichRe.

Sven Harmeling, Team Leader International Climate Policy at Germanwatch and the index’s author: "Both extraordinary weather extremes in 2010 left their footprint in this year’s Climate Risk Index. More than 1500 people died in Pakistan after floodings across the country, causing damages of several billion dollars. These losses moved Pakistan on top of the ranking. A heat wave in Russia has caused more than 50.000 deaths. Many parts of the country were set in flames. This results in Russia ranking fourth in the Index." According to studies by the German Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) the man-made climate change had with an 80 percent certainty a significant influence on those heatwaves.

Guatemala and Colombia rank second and third in 2010 after being hit by storms and floodings. Even though the analysis of damages and deaths cannot lead to conclusions yet on the influence of climate change at these events, it does provide a sense of their vulnerability to climate change.

Sven Harmeling: "The findings can be seen as a warning signal to be better prepared for a higher level of extreme weather events. To be prepared for the future, we need to understand our past’s lectures. Unfortunately, the current inadequate promises of the world’s governments to fight climate change will push our limits of preparing for disasters and adaptation. Durban’s climate summit will also be decisive for necessary commitments made by all governments to reverse the global emissions trend."

From 1991 to 2010 there were 710,000 deaths caused by weather extremes, as well as more than 2.3 trillion US-Dollar damages. All of the top ten countries that have been mostly hit by weather extremes during the past twenty years were developing countries. Those include Bangladesh, Myanmar and Honduras....

Map from the Germanwatch website

Central America learning value of disaster prevention

Danilo Valladares the Eurasia Review via Tierramerica: The growing frequency of weather-related disasters in Central America has led to greater organizational efforts for risk management and emergency response. But during the most recent storm in the region, the fruits of these efforts were still not visible.

The latest tragedy to strike Central America was Tropical Depression 12-E: at the time of writing, a total of 91 fatalities had been recorded, while more than a million people suffered some form of losses and damages in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Guatemala. And this does not include the damages to agriculture and infrastructure, which will take more time to assess. The storm reached the region on Oct. 12, and since then there has been an endless series of emergency situations created by flooded rivers, landslides and collapsing buildings.

The governments of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua declared a “state of calamity” to gain speedier access to funds for emergency relief work. According to Williams De León of the Volunteer Firefighters of Guatemala, the fear instilled by deadly Hurricane Mitch (1998) and greater inter-institutional coordination has led to a change of attitude toward disaster risks.

“A lot of people realized that Guatemala is very vulnerable to the climate and now they are more organized,” he told Tierramérica.

Since 2004, disaster committees have been created at the regional, departmental (provincial) and local levels, with representatives of all levels of government, the private sector and civil society groups involved in emergency relief and prevention.A 2010 standard established basic criteria for construction, and in July safety standards were established for public buildings....

A 2004 flood in Honduras, shot by ZackClark, Wikimedia Commons

Central America floods and landslides 'leave 80 dead'

BBC: The number of people killed by a week of torrential rains, triggering floods and landslides across Central America, has reached at least 80, officials say. El Salvador is the worst-affected, with 32 people killed, mostly buried in their houses by mudslides.

The number of dead in Guatemala has risen to 28, while the total rose to 13 in Honduras, and eight people have died in Nicaragua. Rain generated by a tropical depression continues to fall across the region. International highways have been washed out, villages isolated and thousands of families have lost homes and crops.

The United Nations has classified Central America as one of the parts of the world most affected by climate change. The UN estimates that more than 100,000 people have been affected by the flooding....

Central America map by Wiz9999, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The race for land is destroying the Guatemalan rainforest

Stéphane Foucart in the Guardian (UK) via Le Monde: There are cows as far as the eye can see beside the road leading to the archaeological site of La Joyanca, in north-west Guatemala. Over the last 10 years, the primal forest has been cut down, replaced by grassland for intensive cattle farming. Here in the Petén region, around as well as inside the Laguna del Tigre National Park, agriculture is inexorably devouring the forest.

The process has been triggered incrementally in a series of seemingly minor steps. "At the end of the 1980s, when this zone was not yet a national park, Basic Petroleum obtained an oil exploration concession in the Laguna del Tigre area, in the heart of the forest," said Marco Cerezo, a Guatemalan environmentalist who founded FundaEco, a leading NGO dedicated to nature conservation and development. "Later, the oil companies asked for, and obtained, permission to build a road to their oil wells. And that is where the land clearing started, all along that road. Now approximately 40% of the national park has been cleared."

The same thing is happening across the Petén region, which extends across the northern half of the country to the border with Belize and Mexico. According to the latest report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published at the end of 2010, Guatemala has experienced the most rapid deforestation of any country over the last five years.

In 2010, primary forest accounted for 1.6m hectares, compared with 2.4m 20 years earlier. Guatemala, which, after Brazil, has South America's second-largest rainforest cover, lost an average of 27,000 hectares a year between 2000 and 2005 (a rate of 1.32% per year), increasing to 68,000 hectares a year between 2005 and 2010 (3.72% per year), meaning that the rate of deforestation has almost trebled in the course of a decade....

Tecuamburro, seen here from the north, is a small, forested stratovolcano or lava-dome complex of mostly Pleistocene age. Shot by Lee Siebert, Smithsonian Institution, public domain

Tropical depression Matthew drenches Guatemala

Sarah Grainger in Reuters: Tropical Depression Matthew churned over Guatemala on Saturday, soaking already waterlogged sugar and coffee farms, and the government warned that mudslides could occur in the coming days. Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom told people to stay home and urged communities in mountains and near rivers to take shelter inland as fast-moving Matthew looked set to slow and hang over Guatemala and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

The storm lost force as it came in from the Gulf of Honduras and its maximum sustained winds decreased to near 35 mph late on Saturday. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said the danger had not yet passed. "We must emphasize that despite the expected weakening of Matthew, torrential rains will continue over most of Central America during the next several days," the center said.

Although it was expected to weaken, Matthew still had the potential to bring 6 to 10 inches to Guatemala and southern Mexico and as much as 15 inches to some areas. The storm was moving west-northwest and could become almost stationary by Sunday night. The hurricane center warned Matthew's rains could set off mudslides and flash floods….

Matthew as a tropical storm, September 23, 2010

Hopes fade for Guatemala landslide victims

BBC: Guatemalan officials say they have given up hope for dozens of people buried when a landslide engulfed a highway north-west of the capital. The mud crashed onto the road as a crowd tried to dig out vehicles buried by a previous landslide. President Alvaro Colom has called the landslides a "national tragedy".

So far 38 people are known to have died but with scores of landslips across the country, there are fears the final number of dead will be much higher. Emergency workers have recovered 20 bodies from the massive landslide that engulfed people as they tried to dig out people caught in an earlier landslide on the Inter-American Highway north-west of Guatemala City.

…Weeks of heavy rain have saturated Guatemala's mountainous terrain, causing hillsides to collapse suddenly. Parts of the country have seen the heaviest rainfall for half a century, according to Guatemala's national meteorological institute….

From 2005, a house in Guatemala engulfed by a landslide, shot by Daniel Sanchez-Bustamante, USAID

Climate extremes fuel hunger in Guatemala

Danilo Valladares in IPS: …[Tropical Storm] Agatha departed from Guatemala May 30, leaving behind 165 people dead and over 100,000 affected by destruction of their homes, crops or livelihoods. One month later, Alex added two more to the death toll and 2,000 to the number of material victims, according to the National Disaster Reduction Coordination agency (CONRED).

The storms also hit El Salvador and Honduras, where at least 29 people died and thousands were left homeless, according to disaster relief agencies. But the worst hit by the double whammy of the storms was Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, where half the population live on incomes below the poverty line and 17 percent are extremely poor, according to United Nations statistics.

"Climate change is exacerbating the conditions of poverty and extreme poverty in the country, and above all is complicating the lives of the most vulnerable," Carlos Mancilla, head of the Climate Change Unit at the Environment and Natural Resources Ministry (MARN), told IPS.

Flooding is not the only concern. Paradoxically, one of the main chronic problems in Guatemala is drought, in the "dry corridor" in the north and east of the country. "Adapting to drought is not as easy as coping with floods. How can the social fabric destroyed by a drought be repaired? What happens when the head of a family has to migrate?....”

...Sucely Girón, coordinator of the non-governmental Observatory on the Right to Food Security (ODSAN), told IPS that the country "is not investing in prevention," in spite of having passed a law on food and nutrition security….

Patchwork of cultivated fields on mountain slope in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, shot by the Pink Slip, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Guatemala braces for possible second deadly Pacific storm

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Guatemala Wednesday was bracing for another potentially deadly tropical storm from the Pacific Ocean, only two weeks after Agatha unleashed floods and landslides that left 275 killed or missing, officials said.

A low-pressure system near the Gulf of Tehuantepec, Mexico, was showing signs of strengthening, "with a 60 percent chance it may become a tropical storm," said a spokesman for Guatemala's emergency management agency.

He said the storm would likely bring heavy downpours over Mexico's Pacific coast and possibly over Guatemala, making more floods and landslides likely after Agatha's copious rains….

Deadly storm kills more than 140 in Central America

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: A violent weekend storm that lashed Central America killed at least 144 people, left 53 more missing and 45,000 evacuated from their homes, the Red Cross' Panama-based regional headquarters said.

"The latest reports are of 118 dead in Guatemala and 17 in Honduras, while in El Salvador the death toll as of yesterday (Sunday) stood at nine, but it may have gone higher," Red Cross Pan American Disaster Response Unit chief Paco Maldonado told AFP in Panama City.

Earlier reports put the total death toll at 118, including 92 in Guatemala, the country worst hit by the drenching storm. "Most of the fatalities were due to landslides that collapsed building and peoples' homes," said Maldonado, adding that on Tuesday his unit would start sending help to the afflicted regions. Among the dead in Guatemala were four children in a house that was swept away in a landslide, officials here said.

Tens of thousands of people were in shelters, either because their ramshackle homes had been destroyed or they were evacuated from the path of possible flooding. International aid was beginning to step up. Some aid organizers were turning to Facebook, Twitter and other Internet social networking sites to appeal for necessities to send to populations or authorities.

France said Monday it was sending humanitarian supplies, and issued a statement expressing its condolences to the affected countries. Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said six US military aircraft had been deployed from a base in Honduras….

Guatemala in worst drought in 30 years: UN

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: The United Nations warned Friday that Guatemala is facing its worst drought in three decades, and that at least 2.5 million people have been affected by the crisis. "The country is facing the worst drought in 30 years, which has triggered a food crisis," said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

"The effects of El Nino have extended the dry spell, which has caused a reduction and loss of agricultural production affecting some 2.5 million people in 21 provinces," she added. The situation has claimed some 460 lives since the beginning of the year, according to Guatemalan officials, and the country's President Alvaro Colom has declared it a "public calamity."…

Volcán de Agua ("Volcano of Water"), Guatemala. Seen from road from Chimaltenango traveling towards Antigua Guatemala. Photo by Infrogmation, 1979, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Study finds better forest protection and fewer wildfires in FSC-certified areas in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve

Rainforest Alliance: A new Rainforest Alliance study has found that forest concessions managed in compliance with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification standards have seen fewer wildfires and less deforestation compared with protected and other areas within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, an area of tropical forest in Guatemala's northern Petén region that the government set aside to conserve its unique natural and cultural patrimony.

In 2007, fires affected 0.1 percent of FSC-certified forest concessions in the reserve, down from 6.5 percent in 1998. During the same period, fires affected between 7 and 20 percent of the rest of the reserve. In addition, the average annual deforestation rate in FSC-certified forest concessions between 2002 and 2007 was 20 times lower than the deforestation rate within the protected areas where harvesting of wood and non-timber forest products is prohibited….

"These numbers show that certification is a real tool for the market and for conservation," said José Román Carrera, Central America coordinator for the Rainforest Alliance's TREES program, which works with communities in the Petén. "In these communities, FSC certification has helped strengthen business structures, fire prevention measures and low-impact harvesting practices."

To meet certification standards, forestry communities and companies in the reserve have created fire control and prevention plans, improved living and working conditions for workers, increased the use of safety equipment, experienced less social conflict as a result of better land-use mapping, and created committees to manage land-use, among other things….

Photo by PStreet of Tikal, Wikimedia Commons