Wars in Gaza and Sudan lead to record forced displacement in the world

Images of men, women and children escaping bombings and street killings in Sudan and then Gaza have illustrated much of the news of the last year. The same has happened with the victims of floods, earthquakes and merciless droughts in China, Turkey or the Horn of Africa. Behind these images hides a worrying reality: that of 46.9 million people who for the first time in 2023 had to leave their homes, and in most cases, also their cities or towns, due to war or environmental issues. Many, more than once. Added to those who were already living in this situation, there are 75.9 million people in the world who are displaced due to force majeure compared to 71.1 million the previous year. It is a new record since records began, according to the Internal Displacement Observatory (IDMC), the world’s authoritative source of data and analysis on this phenomenon, which publishes its annual report this Tuesday.

The Observatory, dependent on the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), measures where, when and where Internally Displaced Persons or IDPs moved, those who emigrate against their will, but who do not leave the borders of their country. , unlike refugees. “Millions of families are seeing their lives destroyed by conflict and violence. Never before have we recorded so many people forced to leave their homes and communities. “It is a damning verdict on the failures of conflict prevention and peacemaking,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the NRC, said in a statement.

Measuring the phenomenon is important because it helps understand the state of the world, according to Vicente Anzellini, coordinator of the report. “These are data that are used to know the status of resolution of different conflicts, the resilience of a country to natural disasters or the effects of climate change. Compared with other socioeconomic and development data, they provide a useful perspective,” explains the expert.

This time, the data says that the world is more violent. Of the almost 76 million IDPs in the world, the majority – 68.3 million – escaped a conflict or a context of violence, and a third of them experienced this situation for the first time in 2023. They represent 28 % less than the previous year, mainly because there was less movement in Ukraine, where the war fronts have remained fairly static. However, the total figure is 70% higher than a decade ago.

The crisis in Sudan helped, the country with the highest number of new displacements: six million, the second population movement ever recorded behind the one generated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In total, it houses 9.1 million internally displaced people. : the highest number in the world. Together with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), both African countries account for half of the displacements of the last year. Syria, Colombia, Yemen, Ukraine and Gaza have also contributed to increasing this figure.

Running away from home several times

The case of Gaza draws attention. Since October 7, when Israel began its offensive on the Strip in response to the Hamas attacks, 3.4 million forced movements have been recorded, when the population is 2.3 million inhabitants. That is to say, many of them fled violence not once, but twice or more times. At the end of the year, 83% of the population of the Palestinian enclave was displaced. The figure is slightly lower than that of the DRC (3.7 million), but this country has 100 million inhabitants.

The exacerbated violence reflected in the IDMC results will lead to future impoverishment, because those affected are people who are plunged into a situation of need that they did not suffer before, adds Anzellini. The expert highlights the cyclical nature of the phenomenon as an aggravating factor. “As someone is repeatedly displaced, their financial resilience suffers, as does their way of life, leading to impoverishment that will have longer-term and deeper impacts.” For example, in Gaza more than 60% of the houses are damaged or have disappeared, so even if the Israeli attacks end, it will take many years for Gazans to recover their previous living conditions.

One of the clearest impacts of forced displacement, but quite intangible, is that suffered by future generations. “What is going to happen to the millions of displaced children? What are the repercussions of having to stop going to school? We don’t know, but it will surely limit their opportunities for a promising future,” reflects Anzellini. Another impact is seen in food sovereignty. “When you have millions of people working the land or in food supply chains and they are forced to move, that has a huge and much longer-term economic, social and nutritional impact,” she adds.

Furthermore, IDPs are people who are not considered in the 1951 Refugee Statute because they have not left the borders of their country, so they do not have international protection measures. And this despite the fact that their number (50.8 million) is still larger than that of refugees (29.4 million, according to UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. “This is a phenomenon that implies national responsibility and governmental of a country, but there is no binding international framework that puts the conversation about what countries should do to respond to PID populations on the international agenda,” says the expert, whose organization demands lasting solutions for this group.

El Niño turns the statistics around

Natural disasters caused 26.4 million new displacements in 148 countries, the third highest total in the last decade. At the end of the year, at least 7.7 million people were still in this situation. China and Turkey account for a third of all these movements, but high-income countries such as Canada and New Zealand were also very damaged, reporting the highest figures in their history.

It is contradictory data. On the one hand, the number of people displaced by natural disasters is increasing at a faster rate and affecting almost the entire globe. This is, in fact, another new record in the last decade. However, on the other hand, the movements registered in 2023 were a third less than in the previous year. The explanation partly comes from the change in climate cycles: in 2022, La Niña affected temperatures, the level of precipitation or the risk of cyclones and tropical storms that triggered enormous population movements in Mozambique, China or Pakistan. Meanwhile, 2023 has been the year of El Niño, which has caused fewer storms and floods in Asia, where there is a greater concentration of population, but has caused more in the Horn of Africa and recently in Brazil. Floods were the most damaging phenomenon. They affected 9.8 million people, especially in that African region, with 2.9 million movements.

They were followed by earthquakes, which caused 6.1 million displacements, the highest number since 2008. The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, in February, and that in Morocco, in September, were the most serious, with 4.7 million affected , followed by those from the Philippines and Afghanistan. Furthermore, two-thirds of new displacements in 2023 caused by fires were due to those recorded in Greece and Canada, with 103,000 and 185,000 affected respectively.

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