Conflict and violence have pushed the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) around the world to a record high of 75.9 million, with nearly half living in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The report, released on Tuesday, found that conflicts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) accounted for nearly two-thirds of new displacements due to violence.
The 2024 Global Report on Internal Displacement covers internal displacement due to conflict and violence in 66 countries and territories in 2023, and internal displacement due to disasters in 82 countries and territories. Of the total, 68.3 million people were displaced by conflict and violence last year, and 7.7 million by disasters.
“Over the past two years, we have seen alarming new levels of people having to flee their homes due to conflict and violence, even in regions where the trend had been improving,” Alexandra Bilak, IDMC director said.
In a statement, she said that the millions of people forced to flee in 2023 were just “the tip of the iceberg.”
“Conflict, and the devastation it leaves behind, is keeping millions from rebuilding their lives, often for years on end,” she said.
The report notes the number of internal displacements, that is the number of times people have been forced to move throughout the year to escape conflict within their country, has increased in the last couple of years.
"Millions of families are having their lives torn apart by conflict and violence. We have never, ever recorded so many people forced away from their homes and communities. It is a damning verdict on the failures of conflict prevention and peace-making," said Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
"The suffering and the displacement last far beyond the news cycle. Too often their fate ends up in silence and neglect. The lack of protection and assistance that millions endure cannot be allowed to continue."
In the past five years, the report finds the number of people living in internal displacement because of conflict and violence has increased by 22.6 million. Sudan topped last year’s list of 66 countries with 9.1 million people displaced internally because of conflict, followed by Syria with more than 7 million, the DRC, Colombia and Yemen.
“While we hear a lot about refugees or asylum-seekers who cross the border, the majority of the displaced people actually stay within their country and they are internally displaced,” Christelle Cazabat, head of programs at the IDMC, told journalists in Geneva Monday, in advance of the launch of the report.
In its 2023 report on forcibly displaced populations, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported that 62.5 million people had been internally displaced people at the end of 2022 compared to 36.4 million refugees who had fled conflict, violence and persecution that same year.
According to the IDMC, new internal displacements last year were mostly due to the conflict in Ukraine, which started in 2022, as well as to the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the eruption of war in mid-April 2023 in Sudan.
The war in Sudan resulted in 6 million internal displacements last year, which was “more than its previous 14 years combined” and the second most ever recorded in one country during a single year after Ukraine in 2022, according to the report.
“As you know, it is more than a year that this new wave of conflict erupted (in Sudan) and as of the end of last year, the figure was 9.1 million” displaced in total by the conflict, said Vicente Anzellini, IDMCs global and regional analysis manager and lead author of the report.
“This figure is the highest that we have ever reported for any country, this 9.1 million internally displaced people.”
In the Gaza Strip, the IDMC calculated that 3.4 million people were displaced in the last three months of 2023, many of whom were displaced multiple times during this period. It says this figure represents 17 percent of total conflict displacement worldwide during the year, noting that a total of 1.7 million Palestinians were internally displaced in Gaza by the end of the year.
The last quarter of 2023 is the period in which Israel launched its brutal war on Gaza following large-scale attacks by Palestinian armed groups on October 7.
“There are many other crises that are actually displacing even more people, but we hear a little bit less of them,” said Cazabat, noting that little is heard about the “acute humanitarian crisis in Sudan” though it has the highest number of people “living in internal displacement because of the conflict at the end of last year.”
In addition to the total of 68.3 million people displaced by conflict and violence worldwide in 2023, the report says that 7.7 million people were displaced by natural disasters, including floods, storms, earthquakes and wildfires.
Floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires and other disasters caused 26.4 million displacements in 2023, the third-highest annual total in the past decade. The 7.7 million IDPs displaced by disasters at the end of 2023 is the second highest since the IDMC began tracking this metric in 2019.
As in previous years, the report found that floods and storms caused the most disaster displacement, including in southeast Africa, where Cyclone Freddy triggered 1.4 million movements across six countries and territories.
Earthquakes and volcanic activity caused 6.1 million displacements in 2023, as many as in the previous seven years combined. The earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria caused 4.7 million displacements, one of the largest disaster displacement events since records began in 2008.
Anzellini observed many countries that have experienced conflict displacement also have experienced disaster displacement.
“In many situations, they are overlapping. This is the case in Sudan, in South Sudan, but also in Somalia, in the DRC, and other places,” he said. “So, you can imagine fleeing from violence to save your life and then having to escape to higher ground with whatever you can carry as the storm or a flood threatens to wash away your temporary shelter.”
He said that no country is immune to disaster displacement.
“Last year, we recorded disaster displacements in 148 countries and territories, and these include high-income countries such as Canada and New Zealand, which recorded their highest figures ever.”
“Climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and more intense and that can lead to more displacement, but it does not have to,” he said, noting that climate change is one of many factors that contribute to displacement.
“There are other economic, social and political factors that governments can address to actually minimize the impacts of displacement even in the face of climate change,” he said, including early warning systems and the evacuation of populations before a natural disaster is forecast to strike.
The IDMC's Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID) is the leading source of data and analysis on the state of internal displacement for the previous year. Each year, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre presents the validated estimates of internal displacement due to conflict and disasters, as well as the total cumulative number of IDPs worldwide.
The IDMC was established in 1998 and is part of the Norwegian Refugee Council. The Information Service, based in Geneva, provides estimates of the number of people who are internally displaced or at risk of displacement.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: 2024 Global Report on Internal Displacement, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), report, released May 14, 2024
https://api.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/IDMC-GRID-2024-Global-Report-on-Internal-Displacement.pdf
Website: 2024 Global Report on Internal Displacement, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)
https://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2024/