In 2022, there will be more than 71 million internally displaced individuals.
Dunya News
According to observers, a “perfect storm” of converging crises drove tens of millions of people from their homes last year, setting a record for the number of internally displaced people.
In 2022, there were an unprecedented 71.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), up 20% from the previous year, as a result of the monsoon floods that soaked Pakistan and the war that Russia was waging in Ukraine.
According to a joint report by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), 60.9 million new internal displacements were documented in 2022, with some individuals being forced to leave more than once.
That represents a record-breaking number of internal displacements and an increase of 60% above the roughly 38 million new displacements seen in 2021.
According to IDMC CEO Alexandra Bilak, that number is “extremely high.”
In addition to the floods in Pakistan, new and continuing wars across the world, and a number of abrupt and slow-onset catastrophes that we’ve seen from the Americas all the way to the Pacific, a large portion of the rise is undoubtedly due to the crisis in Ukraine.
– ‘Very volatile’ –
28.3 million people were forced to from their homes because of war last year, more than double from the year before and more than three times the average annual number over the previous ten years.
Eight million people were evicted from their homes by Pakistan’s devastation floods, in addition to the 17 million people who were displaced inside Ukraine last year.
Over half of the 16.5 million displaced people in Sub-Saharan Africa were a result of violence, particularly in Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The number of people internally displaced throughout the world is only likely to increase this year, in part due to new conflicts like the turmoil wreaking havoc in Sudan that is pushing hundreds of thousands to escape.
According to UN figures, more than 700,000 people have already been domestically displaced by the conflict that started on April 15 and 150,000 more have left the nation.
We have already registered the same number of displacements since the beginning of the most current conflict in April as we did for the entire year in 2022, according to Bilak.
She noted that those freshly displaced by the war were joining the ranks of more than three million people who were already displaced across Sudan and said that “clearly, it’s a very volatile situation on the ground.”
– ‘Food security crisis’ –
Internal displacement is a worldwide issue, yet only ten nations—Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, Colombia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan—are home to roughly three-quarters of all IDPs.
Due to ongoing hostilities that have persisted for years and continued to drive people from their homes last year, many of them remain displaced.
Natural catastrophes continued to cause the majority of new internal displacement even as conflict-related displacement increased, resulting in 32.6 million such moves in 2022 — up 40% from the previous year.
A “perfect storm” of interconnected issues that are causing increasing levels of global displacement, according to NRC chairman Jan Egeland, has formed.
He stated in a statement that “last year, conflict and disasters combined to aggravate people’s pre-existing vulnerabilities and inequalities, triggering displacement on a scale never seen before.”
“The war in Ukraine also fuelled a global food security crisis that hit the internally displaced the hardest,” he added.
“This perfect storm has undone years of progress in lowering hunger and malnutrition around the world.”
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