Tens of millions of people worldwide were displaced last year, a 20 percent increase since 2021.
The number of people displaced by conflict and natural disasters reached a record high of 71.1 million last year.
That figure represented a 20 percent increase since 2021 with an unprecedented number of people fleeing in search of safety and shelter, the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) said in a report Thursday.
A “perfect storm” of war and disaster in 2022 led to “displacement on a scale never seen before,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which oversees the IDMC.
By the end of 2022, 5.9 million people had been forced to move within Ukraine due to the Russian invasion, bringing the global total of people internally displaced by conflict and violence to more than 62 million – a 17 percent increase since 2021. Syria had 6.8 million displaced by conflict after more than a decade of civil war.
The number of people displaced within their country due to disasters such as floods and famine at the end of the year was 8.7 million, an increase of 45 percent from 2021.
Internal displacement refers to people forced to move within their own borders, and the Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Center report did not take into account those who moved to other countries.
After a year of conflict raging in Ukraine, Syria, Ethiopia and elsewhere, there has been no respite in 2023. the military and a rival paramilitary group.
The IDMC cited the La Nina weather phenomenon, which continued for the third consecutive year in 2022, as a major factor in the disaster displacement. It contributed to record levels of flood displacement in Pakistan, Nigeria and Brazil and the worst-ever drought in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the report said.