Record of 55 million displaced people in 20 …

In a year marked by the coronavirus pandemic, the number of internally displaced people hit a worrying high of 55 million in 2020. Of this total, 48 million fled conflict and violence and 7 million natural disasters, according to data published this Thursday by the Internal Displacement Observatory (IDMC) in collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). The report further emphasizes that more than 23 million displaced people are minors, which generates a “significant impact” on their education.

“It is shocking that last year, every second, someone was forced to leave their home in their own country.”The NRC president said in a statement: Jan Egeland. Number of internally displaced people doubles the estimated 26 million refugees, that is, people who left their homes and were also forced to leave their country.

“Both of these numbers were exceptionally high.”, Express Alexandra Bilak, Director of IDMC based in Geneva. Bilak said that “Fewer people have sought protection in emergency shelters for fear of catching it”, says covid-19, whose spread has already reached nearly 165 million infections and more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide.

Bilak alerted that the number of displaced people “may worsen as countries enter economic crisis” resulting from the pandemic. The report warned that the convergence of conflicts with natural disasters exacerbates the problem, and that 95 percent of recent conflict displacements have occurred in countries vulnerable to the impact of climate change.

Intense cyclones, rains monsoon and flooding hit highly exposed and densely populated areas of Asia and the Pacific. Cyclone Amphan alone, which hit South Asia in May last year, caused 5 million displacements in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar.

Some 4.5 million people have been displaced by natural disasters in the Americas, the worst numbers in a decade. Hurricanes Eta and Iota last October hit the central region and the Caribbean hard, forcing 1.7 million people to flee their homes, according to the IDMC report. “We can only hope that the future impact of climate change will make these disasters more frequent and more intense and thus increase the number of internally displaced people.”Bilak said.

In two countries such as El Salvador, Haiti, Mexico and Colombia, violence and internal conflicts have caused some 238,000 new people to be displaced. Only Colombia has accumulated 106,000 people and “faces one of the most serious situations of internally displaced persons in the world”., warns the document.

The escalation of violence and the expansion of extremist groups in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Burkina Faso has fueled some of the world’s fastest displacement crises in 2020. Older conflicts, such as those in Syria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also continued to cause large numbers of displaced people.

Bilak stressed that it was “of particular concern that these figures are recorded in the context of the covid-19 pandemic”, which imposed restrictions on the movement of people and made data collection difficult. For this reason, the number of internally displaced people could be even higher. In this regard, the director of IDMC explained that “The lockdowns and the economic downturn have intensified the financial difficulties faced by many displaced people”.