The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes has doubled over the past decade to almost 80 million, according to the UN refugee agency.
A 9 million rise in the number of those forced to flee in 2019, fuelled by conflict in Syria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burkina Faso, means that one in every 97 people around the world – about 1% of all humanity – is now displaced, according to numbers in UNHCR’s annual report, published on Thursday.
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According to UNHCR’s global trends report, only 4 million refugees were able to return to their home countries during the past decade, compared with 1.5 million every year in the 1990s.
The report says that many refugees who did return to their homes last year went back to conditions that remained unstable.
“It’s not surprising that the numbers [of forcibly displaced people] are going up because the rate that people are becoming refugees is greater than the rate that they’re finding solutions,” said Jeff Crisp, a researcher at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre.