UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is today appealing to countries worldwide to do far more to find homes for millions of refugees and others displaced by conflict, persecution, or events seriously disturbing public order.
UNHCR's annual Global Trends report showed that forced displacement is now affecting more than one percent of humanity – 1 in every 97 people – and with fewer and fewer of those who flee being able to return home, the agency told Report.
The report, which comes two days ahead of 20 June World Refugee Day, shows that an unprecedented 79.5 million were displaced as of the end of 2019. UNHCR has not seen a higher total.
The report also notes diminishing prospects for refugees when it comes to hopes of any quick end to their plight. In the 1990s, on average, 1.5 million refugees were able to return home each year. Over the past decade, that number has fallen to around 390,000, meaning that growth in displacement is today far outstripping solutions.
"We are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. "People cannot be expected to live in a state of upheaval for years on end, without a chance of going home, nor the hope of building a future where they are. We need a fundamentally new and more accepting attitude towards all who flee, coupled with a much more determined drive to unlock conflicts that go on for years and at the root of such immense suffering."
UNHCR's Global Trends report shows that of the 79.5 million who were displaced at the end of last year, 45.7 million were people who had fled to other areas of their own countries. The rest were people displaced elsewhere, 4.2 million of them being people awaiting the outcome of asylum requests, while 29.6 million were refugees (26 million) and others forcibly displaced outside their country.
The annual increase, from a figure of 70.8 million at the end of 2018, is a result of two main factors. First is worrying new displacement in 2019, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sahel, Yemen and Syria – the latter now in its ninth year of conflict and accounting on its own for 13.2 million refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people, fully a sixth of the world's total.
Second is a better presentation of Venezuelans' situation outside their country, many of whom are not legally registered as refugees or asylum-seekers, but for whom protection-sensitive arrangements are required.
And within all of these numbers is a multitude of individual and very personal crises. More children (estimated at 30-34 million, tens of thousands of them unaccompanied) are among the displaced than, for example, the entire populations of Australia, Denmark and Mongolia combined. Meanwhile, the proportion of displaced aged 60 and above (4 percent) is far below that of the world population (12 percent) – a statistic that speaks to immeasurable heartbreak, desperation, sacrifice, and being torn apart from loved ones.
Nine things you need to know about forced displacement
- One hundred million people at least were forced to flee their homes in the past decade, seeking refugees either in or outside their countries. That's more people fleeing than the entire population of Egypt, the world's 14th most populous country.
- Forced displacement has almost doubled since 2010 (41 million then vs. 79.5 million now).
- Eighty percent of the world's displaced people are in countries or territories affected by acute food insecurity and malnutrition – many of the countries facing climate and natural disaster risk.
- More than three-quarters of the world's refugees (77 percent) are caught up in long-term displacement situations – for example, the situation in Afghanistan, now in its fifth decade.
- More than eight of every ten refugees (85 percent) are in developing countries, generally, a country neighboring the one they fled.
- Five countries account for two-thirds of people displaced across borders: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar.
- Global Trends Report counts all major displaced and refugee populations, including the 5.6 million Palestine refugees who fall under the care of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.
- Displacement in cities and towns has become widespread. Among internally displaced populations, two-thirds were in urban or semi-urban areas as of 2019, according to available data.
- The 2030 Sustainable Development commitment of "leaving no one behind" now explicitly includes refugees, thanks to a new indicator on refugees approved by the UN Statistical Commission in March this year.
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UNHCR's Global Trends report is released in parallel with its annual Global Report, which reports on actions UNHCR is taking to address the needs of all who are forced to flee and the world's known stateless populations.