Global refugee crisis hits another peak: UN

This article was written by Geoffrey York and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 13, 2024.

Sudan is the worst of the recent refugee crises, with 9.1 million people displaced inside the country by the end of last year, according to UNHCR data.

Report estimates world’s displaced population has grown to 120 million people

The world’s refugee crisis, accelerated by wars in Gaza and Sudan, has surged to another record level this year, with an estimated 120 million people around the world now forced from their homes, the United Nations says.

The relentless rise of forcible displacement has continued this year for the 12th consecutive year, creating a displaced population as large as the entire population of Japan, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said in its latest annual report on global trends.

Compared with a decade ago, the report says, the proportion of the world’s population that is displaced has nearly doubled, to 1.5 per cent.

The report, published on Thursday, blames the expanding crisis on a wave of new wars and a morass of unresolved conflicts, not only in Gaza and Sudan, but also in countries such as Myanmar, Syria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The UN refugee agency responded to 43 separate emergencies in 29 countries last year, including crises involving both internally displaced people and cross-border flows.

“Behind these stark and rising numbers lie countless human tragedies,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement.

“It is high time for warring parties to respect the basic laws of war and international law. The fact is that without better cooperation and concerted efforts to address conflict, human rights violations and the climate crisis, displacement figures will keep rising, bringing fresh misery and costly humanitarian responses.”

At a background briefing, Mr. Grandi said it was a “difficult moment” for the refugee crisis, since the “very fragmented” international political situation is making it more difficult to find solutions to conflicts. The number of refugee emergencies has increased fourfold in recent years, he said.

The surge in displacement is being fuelled by the growing intensity of wars, which are producing a rising number of conflict-related fatalities, according to the UNHCR report. Since 2021, an annual average of 27.8 million people have fled from their homes worldwide – nearly twice the average number over the past quarter-century.

In total numbers, Sudan is the worst of the recent crises, with 9.1 million people displaced inside the country by the end of last year. This is the largest number of people ever recorded to have remained displaced within their own country at year-end, according to the UNHCR data.

Another UN agency, the International Organization for Migration, reported this week that more than 12 million people in Sudan are now internally displaced or refugees abroad, including those who had been displaced even before the latest war erupted between Sudan’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April, 2023.

This means that fully onequarter of Sudan’s entire population has now become internally displaced or refugees abroad. Sudan is also on the verge of becoming the site of the world’s biggest hunger crisis, with more than two million people at high risk of famine if they don’t urgently receive aid, according to the UN’s food agency, the World Food Program.

Gaza is another highly visible crisis, with more than three-quarters of its 2.2 million people forced from their homes by the end of last year, many of them having suffered multiple displacements, the UNHCR report says.

Efforts to help refugees are “severely underfunded,” Mr. Grandi told the briefing, and the backlog of unprocessed asylum claims is continuing to grow, with the United States having the largest backlog.

Only a small fraction of the global displaced population – about six million people – have managed to return to their homes in the past year. “Solutions are very rare,” Mr. Grandi said.

The UNHCR report shows that Canada is among the five countries receiving the largest number of new refugee applications, with nearly 147,000 new claims received last year. The top recipient of new applications was the United States, with about 1.2 million claims.

Canada also resettled more than 51,000 refugees last year – the second-highest number of resettlements, behind only the United States. While the worldwide number of global resettlements was higher than the previous year, it represented only 8 per cent of those who have been identified by UNHCR as needing resettlement.

Author: Ray Nakano

Ray is a retired, third generation Japanese Canadian born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. He resides in Toronto where he worked for the Ontario Government for 28 years. Ray was ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2011 and practises in the Plum Village tradition, supporting sanghas in their mindfulness practice. Ray is very concerned about our climate crisis. He has been actively involved with the ClimateFast group (https://climatefast.ca) for the past 5 years. He works to bring awareness of our climate crisis to others and motivate them to take action. He has created the myclimatechange.home.blog website, for tracking climate-related news articles, reports, and organizations. He has created mobilizecanada.ca to focus on what you can do to address the climate crisis. He is always looking for opportunities to reach out to communities, politicians, and governments to communicate about our climate crisis and what we need to do. He says: “Our world is in dire straits. We have to bend the curve on our heat-trapping pollutants in the next few years if we hope to avoid the most serious impacts of human-caused global warming. Doing nothing is not an option. We must do everything we can to create a livable future for our children, our grandchildren, and all future generations.”