According to observers, a “perfect storm” of overlapping crises prompted tens of millions of people to escape within their own country last year, pushing the number of internally displaced people to a historic high. A record 71.1 million internally displaced people (IDPs) were registered in 2022, up 20% from the previous year, amid major displacement caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the monsoon floods that drenched Pakistan.
According to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a total of 60.9 million new internal displacements were documented in 2022, with some persons forced to migrate multiple times during the year.
This is an all-time high for new internal displacements and a 60% rise compared to the some 38 million fresh displacements seen in 2021.
“That number is extremely high”, IDMC chief Alexandra Bilak told 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.”
‘Highly volatile’
Last year, fresh internal displacements from conflict increased to 28.3 million, nearly double from the previous year and three times the yearly average over the previous decade.
In addition to the 17 million people who were displaced within Ukraine last year, eight million people were displaced by Pakistan’s massive floods.
Around 16.5 million people were displaced in Sub-Saharan Africa, with violence accounting for more than half of them, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia.
Global internal displacement estimates are anticipated to rise this year, spurred in part by new conflicts such as the unrest scorching Sudan, which has forced hundreds of thousands to flee.
More than 700,000 people have been internally displaced as a result of the conflict that began on April 15, and another 150,000 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 added, noting that those freshly displaced by the violence were joining the ranks of more than three million Sudanese who had already been uprooted.
‘Food security emergency’
While internal displacement is a global issue, over three-quarters of the world’s IDPs are concentrated in just ten countries: Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, Colombia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan.
Many of them are still displaced as a result of unsolved conflicts that have raged for years and forced people to evacuate their homes last year.
Even though conflict-related displacement increased, natural disasters continued to account for the majority of new internal displacement, resulting in 32.6 million such moves in 2022, a 40% increase from the previous year.
The intersecting crises that are causing ever more displacement around the world have been termed a “perfect storm” by NRC chief Jan Egeland.
“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.”