Conflict, violence and disasters newly displaced almost 28 million people within their own countries in 2015, according to a report released last week.
The Global Report on Internal Displacement, produced by the Norwegian Refugee Council, shows that of the 27.8 million people displaced in 2015, some 8.6 million of the new displacements in 2015 were associated with conflict and violence and 19.2 million associated with disasters.
Almost 9,000 people were killed and millions displaced from their homes when a massive earthquake shook the country in April last year. © IOM Nepal
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the NRC, said the figures were the “equivalent of the combined populations of New York City, London, Paris and Cairo grabbing what they can carry, often in a state of panic, and setting out on a journey filled with uncertainty”.
“Put another way, around 66,000 people abandoned their homes every day of 2015.”
The new figures take the total number of people displaced within their own countries around the world to some 40.8 million at the end of last year, the highest figure ever recorded and a figure which equates to twice the number of refugees in the world.
Of the 8.6 million newly displaced due to conflict or violence, Syria, Yemen and Iraq accounted for more than half with the rest spread among 25 other countries. And of the 10 countries which have the highest number of internally displaced people, five – Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, South Sudan and Sudan – have been on the list every year since 2003.
Meanwhile, of those newly internally displaced due to disasters, south and east Asian nations were the most affected with India accounting for some 3.7 million, China for 3.6 million and Nepal for 2.6 million. The majority of the 19.2 million new displacements associated with disasters were displaced due to weather-related events such as storms and floods but last year’s earthquake in Nepal is a reminder of the impact of geophysical hazards.
The report’s authors say the figures do not take into account the many other contexts in which people are forced to flee their homes. These include at least a million people who had been displaced by criminal violence associated with drug trafficking and gang activity in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico as of December last year while its estimated that at least 15 million people have been displaced by development projects every year since the mid-2000s.
~ www.internal-displacement.org/globalreport2016/
