May 20, 2021

The number of internally displaced people (IDPs) around the world has
reached an all-time high, according to a new report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

The Geneva-based IDMC, reported on Thursday that in 2019, 45.7 million were on the run from war and natural disasters in their own country.

In 2020, conflict and disasters triggered 40.5 million new internal displacements across 149 countries and territories, a figure which included people forced to move more than once.

“It’s shocking that someone was forced to flee their home inside their own country every single second in 2020,“said the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland.

The Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID) estimates that 45.7 million people are living in internal displacement as a result of conflict and violence in 61 countries, the majority in Syria, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Yemen and Afghanistan. Another 5.1
million in 95 countries are displaced because of disasters.

This includes 1.2 million people displaced by years of drought and floods in Afghanistan, more than 500,000 by monsoon rains in India and 33,000 whose lives are still uprooted a decade after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

“IDPs are often highly vulnerable people living in crowded camps, emergency shelters and informal settlements with little or no access to healthcare,” said IDMC’s director, Alexandra Bilak. “The global coronavirus pandemic will make them more vulnerable still. It will compromise their already precarious living conditions, by further limiting their access to essential services and humanitarian aid.”

“It is particularly concerning that these high figures were recorded against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, when movement restrictions obstructed data collection and fewer people sought out emergency shelters for fear of infection,’’ IDMC director Alexandra Bilak added.

“Conflict, violence and disasters continue to uproot millions of people from their homes every year. Never in IDMC’s history have we recorded more people internally displaced than we do today.”

The IDMC said escalating violence in Mozambique and Burkina Faso as well as ongoing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and the Congo had led to massive new refugee movements, while natural disasters also led to displacements.

These included Cyclone Amphan in Asia and other heavy storms in Central America and the Caribbean, while in Africa and the Middle East, millions left their homes because of flooding.

“The GRID shows that measuring and understanding a problem is the cornerstone of efforts to resolve it, but resources and political commitment are also needed if IDPs are to make tangible progress in re-establishing their lives,” said Bilak. “As the coronavirus pandemic casts an unforgiving light on the urgency of our task, we hope the lessons documented in this report will
prove useful in our collective efforts to end internal displacement.”