The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports that forced displacement around the world has reached historic highs, driven by conflict, persecution, human rights abuses, the climate crisis and other events disturbing public order. In a report released on Thursday, UNHCR said the number of forcibly displaced people continued to rise this year and now stands at 120 million.
The rise in total forced displacement was the twelfth consecutive annual increase, reflecting both new and mutating conflicts and the failure to resolve long-standing crises. At 120 million, the global displaced population would be equivalent to the twelfth largest country in the world, roughly the size of Japan.
In its 2024 Global Trends Report, UNHCR said 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2023. Some 68 million were uprooted from their homes by conflict and remain displaced within their own countries. Another 31 million were refugees, while tens of millions more were asylum-seekers, returnees or stateless people.
The devastating conflict in Sudan was a key factor in driving up the numbers: by the end of 2023, 10.3 million Sudanese remained uprooted. The war in Sudan erupted in April 2023. By the end of the year, an estimated 1.2 million people had fled the country, with almost all Sudanese refugees hosted by neighboring countries. An additional 9.1 million Sudanese were internally displaced, including those displaced by previous conflicts.
As of June 2024, Sudan has the largest internally displaced population ever reported, with more than 10 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). More than 2 million people have crossed borders into other countries. In total, more than 12 million people have been displaced by conflict, making Sudan the world's second-largest displacement crisis.
Syria remains the world's largest displacement crisis, with 13.8 million people forcibly displaced inside and outside the country.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Myanmar, millions were internally displaced last year by vicious fighting. The report says more than 1.3 million people were displaced within Myanmar in 2023 "by escalating violence following the military takeover in February 2021" and that a resurgence of fighting in the eastern part of DRC uprooted 3.8 million people who "were newly internally displaced" during the year.
The UN report also touches on what it calls the endless conflicts and fragile situations that continue to displace people in countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. By the end of 2023, nearly three out of four refugees - 73 percent - came from just five countries: Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Sudan.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) estimates that by the end of last year, up to 1.7 million people - 75 percent of the population - had been displaced by the catastrophic violence in the Gaza Strip, most of them Palestinian refugees.
“Behind these stark and rising numbers lie countless human tragedies. That suffering must galvanize the international community to act urgently to tackle the root causes of forced displacement,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in a statement.
“It is high time for warring parties to respect the basic laws of war and international law. The fact is that without better cooperation and concerted efforts to address conflict, human rights violations and the climate crisis, displacement figures will keep rising, bringing fresh misery and costly humanitarian responses.”
The largest increase in the number of people displaced was among those fleeing conflict and remaining in their own country, which rose to 68.3 million, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) - an increase of almost 50 percent in five years.
The number of refugees and others in need of international protection rose to 43.4 million, including those under the mandates of UNHCR and UNRWA.
The report debunks the common misconception that many refugees go to rich countries. The vast majority of refugees are hosted in countries neighboring their own, with 75 percent living in low- and middle-income countries that together produce less than 20 percent of the world's income.
The report also notes that while children make up 30 percent of the world's population, they account for 40 percent of all forcibly displaced people.
"Conflict remains a very, very big driver of displacement," Grandi told journalists in Geneva earlier this week in advance of the report's publication.
The UN High Commissioner added that UNHCR "declared 43 emergencies in 29 countries" in 2023. "This figure, until two, three years ago, used to be on average eight, maximum 10 times a year."
Grandi lamented changes in the conduct of wars, noting that almost everywhere today, warring parties "disregard the laws of war, of international humanitarian law and often with the specific purpose of terrorizing people, of instilling fear in people."
"This, of course is a powerful contributor to more displacement than even in the past," he said.
Of the complex mix of different factors uprooting populations around the world, Grandi described climate change as a particularly virulent driver of conflict and displacement, with one sometimes triggering the other.
"It can be a driver of conflict and hence of displacement, especially when the very scarce resources of very poor communities become even scarcer because of climate change," he said.
"That drives conflict. We have seen it in so many parts of Africa, in the Sahel, for example. In the Horn of Africa, but also elsewhere."
The report identified the United States as the world's largest recipient of new asylum claims, with 1.2 million applications in 2023, followed by Germany, Egypt, Spain and Canada. However, the world's largest refugee receiving countries are: Iran (3.8 million), Turkey (3.3 million), Colombia (2.9 million), Germany (2.6 million), and Pakistan (2 million).
The report's authors acknowledge that solutions to forced displacement are very rare. They note that only about five million IDPs and one million refugees returned home in 2023.
Despite this grim assessment, High Commissioner Grandi said that solutions do exist, citing the example of Kenya, which has implemented the so-called Shirika Plan to address its pressing refugee problem.
"The President has decided, and the country's institutions have approved, that for the 600,000 refugees in Kenya, mostly Somalis and South Sudanese, measures will be progressively taken to include them in the communities in which they live."
"I consider that a positive trend," he said. "And Kenya being an important country in East Africa, I hope that this will have a positive impact also on other countries."
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is a UN agency mandated to assist and protect refugees, forcibly displaced persons, and stateless persons. The organization is known by its short name, UN Refugee Agency.
UNHCR was established by the United Nations General Assembly on December 14, 1950, to provide assistance to refugees resulting from World War II. UNHCR began operations on January 1, 1951. Headquartered in Geneva, the UN Refugee Agency assists millions of refugees and displaced persons worldwide each year.
The latest Global Trends report provides an overview of key statistical trends related to forced displacement. It includes the latest official statistics on refugees, asylum applicants, internally displaced persons and stateless people, as well as the number of refugees who have returned home.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: Global Trends – Forced displacement in 2023, UNHCR, report, published June 13, 2024
https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends-report-2023