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Radio France Internationale
Radio France Internationale
World
RFI

More than 71 million people internally displaced in 2022: report

Somalis displaced by drought sit next to their makeshift shelter at a camp in Dolow on May 1, 2023. AFP - HASSAN ALI ELMI

A "perfect storm" of overlapping crises forced tens of millions to flee within their own country last year, sending the number of internally displaced people to a record high, monitors said on Thursday.

A record 71.1 million internally displaced people (IDPs) were registered in 2022, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.

Some people were forced to flee multiple times during the year, according to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

That number is "extremely high", IDMC chief Alexandra Bilak told the French press agency AFP.

"Much of the increase is caused, of course, by the war in Ukraine, but also by floods in Pakistan, by new and ongoing conflicts across the world, and by a number of sudden and slow onset disasters that we've seen from the Americas all the way to the Pacific."

'Very volatile'

Last year, new internal displacements from conflict surged to 28.3 million, nearly doubling from a year earlier and three times higher than the annual average over the past decade.

Beyond the 17 million displacements inside Ukraine last year, eight million were forced from their homes by Pakistan's monster floods.

A flood victim pushes his donkey cart on flooded highway, following rains and floods during the monsoon season in Sehwan, Pakistan, September 16, 2022. REUTERS - AKHTAR SOOMRO

Sub-Saharan Africa saw around 16.5 million displacements, more than half of them due to conflict, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Ethiopia.

The global internal displacement figures are only expected to grow this year, driven in part by fresh conflicts like the violence ravaging Sudan forcing hundreds of thousands to flee.

People displeced by conflict and violence in 2022. © screengrab IDCM GRID 2023 report

More than 700,000 people have already become internally displaced by the fighting that erupted on April 15, while another 150,000 people have fled the country, according to UN numbers.

"Since the start of the ... most recent conflict in April, we've already recorded the same number of displacements as we did for the whole year in 2022," Bilak said.

"Clearly, it's a very volatile situation on the ground," she said, pointing out that those being newly displaced by the fighting were joining the ranks of more than three million people already displaced across Sudan.

'Food security crisis'

While internal displacement is a global phenomenon, nearly three quarters of the world's IDPs live in just 10 countries: Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Colombia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan.

Ethiopian refugees fleeing from the fighting in Tigray region, wait for food at the Um Rakoba camp, on the Sudan-Ethiopia border, in al-Qadarif state, Sudan November 23, 2020. REUTERS - MOHAMED NURELDIN ABDALLAH

Many of them remain displaced due to unresolved conflicts that have dragged on for years and continued to force people to flee their homes last year.

And even as conflict-related displacement surged, natural disasters continued to account for most new internal displacement, spurring 32.6 million such movements in 2022, up 40 percent from a year earlier.

People displaced by disasters in 2022. © screengrab IDCM GRID 2023 report

NRC chief Jan Egeland described the overlapping crises spurring ever more displacement around the world as a "perfect storm".

"Conflict and disasters combined last year to aggravate people's pre-existing vulnerabilities and inequalities, triggering displacement on a scale never seen before," he said in a statement.

"The war in Ukraine also fuelled a global food security crisis that hit the internally displaced hardest," he said.

"This perfect storm has undermined years of progress made in reducing global hunger and malnutrition."

(with wires)

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