One person displaced every second in 2016
Overshadowed by migrant, refugee focus
LONDON: More than 31 million people — one person every second — were uprooted in their home countries in 2016 because of conflicts and disasters, and numbers will grow unless the underlying causes like climate change and political turmoil are tackled, an aid group said on yesterday.
Nearly 7 million people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, were displaced because of conflicts, according to data by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which is part of aid agency Norwegian Refugee Council.
A further 24 million people, mainly in Asia, were forced to flee to another area of the country because of a natural disaster, such as storms, floods and wildfires, the IDMC said in a report.
Unlike refugees, who seek asylum in other countries, internally displaced people (IDPs) remain in their own country and can’t claim international protection, IDMC says.
For this reason, IDPs are often overlooked until humanitarian crises spill across borders, said IDMC’s director Alexandra Bilak.
“It can easily fall off the agenda because national governments, in some cases, don’t want to acknowledge it and certainly don’t want anyone externally to start looking into the affairs in their sovereign state,” she said.
In 2016, conflicts uprooted the most people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 922,000 fleeing their homes, followed by Syria (824,000) and Iraq (659,000).
Afghanistan ranked fourth in terms of displacement caused by conflict, with 653,000, followed by Nigeria with 501,000 and Yemen with 478,000.
But natural disasters displaced three times more people than conflicts, with most of the 24 million people affected hit by sudden-onset weather hazards such as floods, storms, wildfires and severe winter conditions.
China tops the list of new displacements due to disasters, with 7.4 million people driven from their homes, followed by the Philippines (5.9 million), India (2.4 million) and Indonesia (1.2 million).
These displacements are expected to increase in the future as the impact of climate change becomes more acute, said the report.
Ms Bilak said policymakers urgently need to address the root causes of displacement and focus more attention on IDPs since they may well flee to other countries if their situation worsens.
“People who are displaced over long periods of time and facing huge threats to their daily safety and security will ultimately have to seek protection elsewhere if they’re not getting it in their country,” she said.
Millions of Syrians were displaced during the first years of the war, Ms Bilak said, and it wasn’t until 2014 and 2015 when they started to flee the country in huge numbers, triggering the biggest migration crisis since World World II.
“Not enough is being spent on prevention and much more is being spent on the symptoms of these crises,” she said.
“With the impact of climate change, for example, in the future it is only going to lead to more extreme weather ... which will put pressure on resources, which will lead to more conflicts and it contribute to that vicious cycle of displacement,” she said.
Internal displacement is overshadowed by the current global focus on refugees and migrants, said the monitoring centre. More aid was spent last year on refugee resettlement than in the countries where the crises began, it added.
There was a total of 40.3 million people displaced by conflict and violence in their countries by the end of 2016 — a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000 and has increased sharply over the past five years.