World Refugee Day, June 20, 2018
Here are the key facts you need to know:
- In 2017, 68.5 million people were driven from their homes across the world. This is more people than the population of Thailand.
- There are 25.4 million refugees in the world. This is 2.9 million more than in 2016, also the biggest increase UNHCR has ever seen in a single year.
- New displacement is also growing, with 16.2 million people displaced during 2017 itself. That is an average of one person displaced every two seconds.
- The biggest number of displaced come from the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war in South Sudan and the flight into Bangladesh from Myanmar of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees.
- Developing countries hosted 85 percent of refugees
- Four out of five refugees remain in countries next door to their own.
- Turkey remained the world's leading refugee hosting country in terms of absolute numbers, with a population of 3.5 million refugees, mainly Syrians.
- Lebanon hosted the largest number of refugees relative to its national population.
- 63 per cent of all refugees under UNHCR's responsibility were in just 10 countries.
- Due to a drop in the number of resettlement places on offer, the number of resettled refugees was down by over 40 per cent at around 100,000 people.
Key areas of conflict in the world which have contributed to significantly to the increase of displaced people over the past five years are: Syria, Burundi, Central African Republic, the DRC, Iraq, Myanmar, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen.
You can read the full UNHCR report here: http://www.unhcr.org/5b27be547