NEW YORK: A “perfect storm” of overlapping crises forced tens of millions to flee within their own country last year, sending the number of internally displaced people to a record high, monaitors said on Thursday.
An unprecedented 71.1 million internally displaced people (IDPs) were registered in 2022 – up 20 percent from a year earlier – amid mass displacement for Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as by the monsoon floods that drenched Pakistan.
A full 60.9 million new internal displacements were meanwhile reported in 2022, with some people forced to flee multiple times during the year, according to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
That marks an all-time high for new internal displacements, and an increase of 60 percent 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.”
Last year, new internal displacements from conflict surged to 28.3 million – nearly doubling from a year earlier and three times higher than the annual average over the past decade. –Agencies
