Nearly 60mn people internally displaced worldwide in 2021

Around 38 million new internal displacements were reported in 2021, with some people forced to flee multiple times during the year, according to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the Norwegian Refugee Council

Conflicts and natural disasters forced tens of millions of people to flee within their own country last year, pushing the number of internally displaced people to a record high, monitors said on May 19. Some 59.1 million people were registered as internally displaced worldwide in 2021 — an all-time record expected to be broken again this year amid mass displacement inside war-torn Ukraine.

Around 38 million new internal displacements were reported in 2021, 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 the second-highest annual number of new internal displacements in a decade after 2020, which saw record-breaking movement due to a string of natural disasters.

Last year, new internal displacements from conflict surged to 14.4 million — marking a 50% jump from 2020 and more than doubling since 2012, the report showed. And global internal displacement figures are only expected to grow this year, driven in particular by the war in Ukraine.

More than eight million people have already been displaced within the war-ravaged country since Russia's full-scale invasion began on February 24, in addition to the more than six million who have fled Ukraine as refugees. "2022 is looking bleak," IDMC director Alexandra Bilak told reporters.

The record numbers seen in 2021, she said, marked "a tragic indictment really on the state of the world and on peace-building efforts in particular". NRC chief Jan Egeland agreed, warning: "It has never been as bad as this." "The world is falling apart," he told reporters. "The situation today is phenomenally worse than even our record figure suggests."

In 2021, sub-Saharan Africa counted the most internal movements, with more than five million displacements reported in Ethiopia alone, as the country grappled with the raging and expanding Tigray conflict and a devastating drought. That marks the highest figure ever registered for a single country.