One out of every 69 individuals on Earth is now displaced.
That is about 120 million individuals, or 1.5 percent of the world’s population, who haveactually been rootedout from their homes.
Behind these numbers are many human stories of households apart, incomes lost and neighborhoods shattered.
Sixty-eight million of those are internally displaced within their own nations. The rest are refugees in requirement of security (43.4 million) and individuals who are lookingfor asylum (6.9 million), according to the yearly displacement report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) .
To raise awareness about the scenario of refugees aroundtheworld, the UN designated June 20 each year as World Refugee Day.
If byforce displaced individuals formed a nation, it would be the 13th most inhabited in the world simply behind Japan. About half of these byforce displaced individuals are kids.
Visualising 72 years of refugee journeys
In 1951, the UN developed the Refugee Convention to safeguard the rights of refugees in Europe in the consequences of World War II. In 1967, the convention was broadened to address displacement throughout the rest of the world.
When the Refugee Convention was born, there were 2.1 million refugees. By 1980, the number of refugees tape-recorded by the UN exceeded 10 million for the veryfirst time. Wars in Afghanistan and Ethiopia throughout the 1980s triggered the number of refugees to double to 20 million by 1990.
The number of refugees stayed relatively constant over the next 2 years.
However, the United States intrusion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 together with civil wars in South Sudan and Syria resulted in refugee numbers surpassing 30 million by the end of 2021.
The war in Ukraine, which began in 2022, led to one of the fastest growing refugee crises because World War II with 5.7 million individuals required to getaway Ukraine in less than a year. By the end of 2023, 6 million Ukrainians stayed byforce displaced.
Read more:
- West still inviting Ukrainian refugees, however obstacles lie ahead
- The ‘impossible’ life of Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees
- ‘In campingtents onceagain’: Life comes complete circle for Afghans expelled from Pakistan
In 2023, dispute in Sudan inbetween the army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary increased the number of refugees to 1.5 million. Before the war, Sudan hadactually taken in lotsof Syrian refugees. When the war began, the number of Syrian refugees in Sudan dropped from 93,500 in 2022 to 26,600 in 2023 as lotsof left for other nations. Thousands of individuals are still being displaced day-to-day more than a year after the dispute started.
Read more:
- Nowhere safe in Gaza: How Israeli attacks haveactually pressed more than 1.5 million individuals into Raf