One in every 69 people on Earth is now displaced.
This represents around 120 million people, or 1.5% of the world’s population, who have been uprooted from their homes.
Behind these numbers are countless human stories of families torn apart, livelihoods lost and communities destroyed.
Sixty-eight million of these people are internally displaced within their own countries. The remainder are refugees in need of protection (43.4 million) and people seeking asylum (6.9 million), according to the annual displacement report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
To raise awareness of the plight of refugees around the world, the UN has designated June 20th of each year as World Refugee Day.
If forcibly displaced people formed a country, it would be the 13th most populous in the world, behind Japan. About half of these forcibly displaced people are children.
Visualizing 72 years of refugee journeys
In 1951, the UN established the Refugee Convention to protect the rights of refugees in Europe after World War II. In 1967, the convention was expanded to address displacement in the rest of the world.
When the Refugee Convention was born, there were 2.1 million refugees. In 1980, the number of refugees registered by the UN exceeded 10 million for the first time. Wars in Afghanistan and Ethiopia during the 1980s caused the number of refugees to double to 20 million in 1990.
The number of refugees remained fairly consistent over the next two decades.
However, the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, along with civil wars in South Sudan and Syria, resulted in the number of refugees exceeding 30 million by the end of 2021.
The war in Ukraine, which began in 2022, has led to one of the fastest-growing refugee crises since World War II, with 5.7 million people forced to flee Ukraine in less than a year. As of late 2023, six million Ukrainians remain forcibly displaced.
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In 2023, conflict in Sudan between the army and Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries increased the number of refugees to 1.5 million. Before the war, Sudan welcomed many Syrian refugees. When the war began, the number of Syrian refugees in Sudan fell from 93,500 in 2022 to 26,600 in 2023, as many left for other countries. Thousands of people continue to be displaced daily, more than a year after the conflict began.
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More recently, Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip has had a devastating impact on the Palestinian population. UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, estimated that from October to December, up to 1.7 million people – more than 75 percent of the population – were displaced within the Gaza Strip, with many forced to run away several times.
The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is extremely dire, with all 2.3 million inhabitants facing food shortages and the threat of famine.
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In 2024, nearly three-quarters (72%) of all refugees came from just five countries: Afghanistan (6.4 million), Syria (6.4 million), Venezuela (6.1 million), Ukraine (6 million), and Palestine (6 million). .
Under international law, refugees are people who are forced to flee their countries of origin to escape persecution or a serious threat to their life, limb or freedom.
Where do refugees settle?
Almost 70 percent of refugees and other people in need of international protection live in countries close to their countries of origin.
Globally, the largest refugee populations are hosted by Iran (3.8 million), Turkey (3.3 million), Colombia (2.9 million), Germany (2.6 million) and Pakistan (2 million).
Almost all refugees in Iran and Pakistan are Afghans, while the majority of refugees in Turkey are Syrians.
Over the past decade, the number of refugees has increased in these main host countries, except in Turkey, where the number has fallen by 14 percent since 2021.
Germany is the only major host country that does not share borders with the main refugee source countries. The majority of refugees in Germany at the end of 2023 were from Ukraine (1.1 million), Syria (705,800), Afghanistan (255,100) and Iraq (146,500).
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
