Long conflicts and new ones such as those in Sudan and Gaza, combined with natural disasters, forced tens of millions of people to leave their homes in 2023 and once again broke the record for internally displaced people in the world, up to 75.9 million. according to a report published this Tuesday.
The annual study published by the NGOs Internal Displacement Observatory (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) showed a year-on-year increase of 6.7% in the displaced population worldwide, reaching the highest figure since 2008. to prepare this report.
Internally displaced persons due to conflicts stood at 68.3 million at the end of 2023, 9% more than in 2023, with Sudan being the country with the largest population in this situation (9.1 million, the highest number in a single country since the beginning of these studies in 2008), due to the civil war that began in April of that year. Next were Syria (7.2 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (6.7 million), Colombia (5.1 million) and Yemen (4.5 million), all of them victims of long internal conflicts.
In Palestine, the conflict that began on October 7 of last year had left a total of 1.7 million displaced by the end of 2023, more than three quarters of the population of the strip, according to IDMC and NRC.
Regarding prolonged internal displacement due to natural disasters (7.7 million), at the end of 2023 there were 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1.2 million in Pakistan, 881,000 in Ethiopia, 882,000 in Turkey and 639,000 in China. .
Last year, on the other hand, there were 46.9 million displacements, of which 20.5 million were due to conflicts and 26.4 million to natural disasters, these indicators are different from those of displaced people, since the same person can have left home several times or have already returned to it.
Last year, some of these large flows of moving populations occurred in Sudan (more than 6 million displaced by the conflict), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3.7 million) or Palestine (3.4 million concentrated in the last three months of the year), which alone concentrated two thirds of the new movements throughout the year.
The worst exoduses of 2023 due to natural disasters occurred in Turkey and Syria due to the February earthquake (4 million displacements in the first country and 700,000 in the second) and in China due to summer floods, with more than 4.7 million movements.
41% of new displacements were recorded in Sub-Saharan Africa (19.5 million), and 22% in East Asia and the Pacific (10.5 million), but the report warns that developed countries are also increasingly affected by These trends, as shown last year in Canada and Greece, the nations in the world with the most movements due to fires.
IDMC and NRC highlighted in their report that the number of internally displaced people in the world has increased by more than 50% in the last five years, reaching “alarming levels of people forced to flee their homes due to conflict and violence,” in words of the director of the first of these NGOs, Alexandra Bilak.
The new annual record of displaced people “indicates a failure in conflict prevention and peacekeeping efforts,” added Jan Egeland, secretary general of the NRC and former United Nations humanitarian coordinator.
