Conflicts and natural disasters, many of them caused by climate change, caused 2021 to end with 57,1 million internally displaced persons in their countries of origin.
Current internally displaced persons are almost twice as many as those registered ago 10 years, alerted this Thursday (19.05.2022) the report published annually by two NGOs, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
“Displacement is increasing in scale, complexity , severity and duration”, analyzed at a press conference when presenting the figures the director of IDMC, Alexandra Bilak, while her counterpart at NRC, Jan Egeland, assured that “no year of which we have statistics had been as bad as the past ” .
Of the more than 59 million displaced, 57, 2 million were forced to leave their homes due to conflict and violence, an increase of 10 % compared to the end of 2020, while 5.9 million did so due to natural disasters, a decrease of 15 %.
The war in Ukraine, which has so far caused about 8 million internally displaced persons, will probably cause the figures to increase again at the end of 2022, and that the humanitarian situation of this group, not only in the European country, will worsen.
Things are also getting worse in Latin America
“Things are getting worse not only in Ukraine, but also in other parts of the world where there are now displacements, such as the Horn of Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), or Latin America, where there is still violence in Colombia or Central America”, analyzed Egeland.
“In addition to the war in Ukraine is making it difficult to help two displaced, due to its effect on the sharp rise in the price of food, fuel and fertilizers. 2021 It was a bleak year, but 2022 it will surely be even worse”, predicted the secretary general of the NRC, former coordinator humanitarian at the UN.
Until the end of last year, the country with the most internally displaced persons due to conflicts, today surely surpassed by Ukraine, was Syria (6.7 million), followed by the DRC (5 .3 million), Colombia (5.2 million) and Afghanistan (4.4 million).
As for the 5.9 million people still displaced by natural disasters, 1.4 million are located in Afghanistan (affected by severe droughts in recent months), 943.000 in China and 700.000 in the Philippines, the three most affected countries.
In the year 2021 there were 23, 7 million trips by these disasters (especially storms, cyclones and floods), although in many cases they were preventive evacuations in l so that those affected could later return to their homes, if these were not destroyed by the natural catastrophe.
The 80 % of displaced by violence is in Africa
Africa concentrates 80 % of those internally displaced by conflicts and violence, while more than half of those caused by natural disasters (57 %) occurred in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the study.
This underlines that in some cases conflicts and disasters overlap, as occurs in many groups that are forced to leave their homes due to both factors at the same time in countries such as Somalia, South Sudan, Mozambique or Burma (Myanmar).
The IDMC and NRC report pays special attention this year to displaced young people, since more than half of this group, 33 million, are under 25 years.
“In Ukraine two-thirds of children havelost its roots, in Yemen the increasingly worse conditions have left millions of them, Bilak recalled, also drawing attention to the case of Colombia.
In the South American country, he stressed, the incidence of depression and anxiety among displaced minors is double that of the rest of society, suicide attempts are four times more frequent, and the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder is six times greater.
The head of IDMC added that it is difficult to assess whether the pandemic has caused more displacement or has prolonged it over time, although it is certain that “it has caused the lives of these displaced persons were more precarious, with movement restrictions in many countries”.
The report estimates that these millions of displaced persons represent a cost to the world of about 21.05 millions of dollars, a particularly heavy price for countries devastated by conflict such as Syria, where related losses are estimated to subtract 15% from its GDP, or Somalia (10 %).
This calculation of internally displaced persons does not include to the group of refugees, people who have left their country due to conflicts or disasters, which in the middle of last year was estimated at 82 million people, according to the statistics published each June by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
CP (efe, afp)