Calay News
According to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), last year saw a record 71 million people internally displaced within their own countries due to accumulating crises. This figure represents an annual increase of 20% and was driven by the mass exodus caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and catastrophic floods in Pakistan.
The number of newly displaced people reached nearly 61 million, with some people forced to flee multiple times, representing a 60% increase compared to 2021. IDMC Director Alexandra Bilak called this number “extremely high.” The war in Ukraine and floods in Pakistan, along with other conflicts and natural disasters around the world, contributed to this increase.
In 2022, conflict-induced internal displacement reached 28.3 million, almost double the number in 2021 and three times the annual average of the last decade. This includes 17 million people displaced within Ukraine and eight million forced to flee their homes due to flooding in Pakistan. In sub-Saharan Africa, 16.5 million people were internally displaced, more than half due to conflict, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia.
The number of IDPs is expected to increase further in 2023. In Sudan, recent fighting has forced 700,000 people to flee to other parts of the country, and IDMC chief Alexandra Bilak said that since the most recent conflict began in April, they have already recorded the same number of displacements as in all of 2022.
Although people are forced to flee in all regions of the world, nearly three-quarters of IDPs reside in ten countries: Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, Colombia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan. Many of these displacements are the result of protracted conflicts, but the majority of new internal displacements are due to natural disasters. In 2022, 32.6 million people were forced to flee due to these disasters, 40% more than in 2021.
NRC chief Jan Egeland called this accumulation of crises a “perfect storm” that exacerbates existing vulnerabilities and inequalities and causes displacement on an unprecedented scale. He also denounced the global food crisis, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, which has undermined years of progress.
