1% of humanity now displaced after biggest refugee rise, says UN

More than 30 million children are currently displaced

Burundian refugee Nyamoza Rachel, 24, sits with her husband and children outside her kitchen that was built to house a new stove design for refugees in Nyarugusu camp. Georgina Goodwin / UNHCR

Attayoub with his daughter Bushra. She is a smart young girl of 5 and she wants to go to school. Jerry de Mars / UNHCR

A worker from the local Tanzanian host community waters young saplings at the tree nursery project established by the non-governmental organisation, Relief To Development Society (REDESO), at Nduta camp. Georgina Goodwin / UNHCR

Ninety-year-old returnee from Pakistan, Haji Sakhi Rahman, arrives at his home in Tarakhil Daag. After living as a refugee in Pakistan for 40 years he returned to Afghanistan four years ago. Claire Thomas / UNHCR

This family of 17 people has been walking for five days. They are trying to warm up in the sun after leaving their shelter early in the morning. They are trying to reach the city of Pamplona and from there they want to go to Cali, where they have family members with whom they could stay. Hélène Caux / UNHCR

“I arrived today at the border with my husband and two children," says Daniela, 29, with her 10-month-old baby at the Ecuador-Peru border. "We left Venezuela five days ago by bus. My husband is checking now how to get the entry stamp on our passports. I wanted to cross the border before 15 June, when the humanitarian visa will become mandatory. We don’t really know what will happen after that. We want to go to Lima where we can stay with friends. It is impossible to remain in Venezuela, there is no medicine, little food, and everything is so expensive." Hélène Caux / UNHCR

Rawda Yusuf, 42, fled from Kurgei West village in Sudan’s North Darfur region to Chad in 2005. She returned home in November 2019 but is living with her four children in Kassab internally displaced persons camp in Kutum, because her home has been occupied and it is not safe to return to her village. Modesta Ndubi / UNHCR

Ghania (left) and her daughter Iman at their home in Basra, Iraq. Houssam Hariri / UNHCR

Sidra Taleb looks out across the water from the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. The 21-year-old Syrian refugee from Aleppo has been living here since 2014 and is studying dentistry thanks to a Turkiye Burslari scholarship. Diego Ibarra Sánchez / UNHCR

Hanan Seif Hassan (centre-right), a 32-year-old refugee from Yemen, prepares samosas with her best friend, 26-year-old Ethiopian, Yanchinew Gebeyehu, on a cooking course at Nefas Silk Polytechnic College in Addis Ababa. Eduardo Soteras Jalil / UNHCR

Rohingya children participate in Essence of Learning activities in one of Caritas’s child-friendly spaces in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. Antoine Tardy / UNHCR

Binianga Asiya and her family are Congolese returnees living in their new house in Tshikapa in the Kasai region of south-central Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She fled to Angola with her husband, Moualimu Moussa Mulumba (right), and their three children during the violence that began in 2017 but has returned to start over. John Wessels / UNHCR

Rohingya children participate in Essence of Learning activities in one of Caritas’s child-friendly spaces in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. Antoine Tardy / UNHCR

Six-year-old Syrian refugee, Sondes Younes, takes part in an interactive theatre activity run by UNHCR partner, the Arab Institute for Human Rights (IADH), with Tunisian and other refugee children from the Dar Saïda neighbourhood of Tunis. John Wessels / UNHCR

Maryna* stands on the balcony of her apartment block in Svitlodarsk, Donetsk. The 56-year-old mother of two has survived cancer and lives with her mother just two kilometres from the frontline. She has struggled with insomnia and anxiety because of the ongoing violence in Ukraine. Oksana Parafeniuk / UNHCR

A 59 year old South Sudanese refugee man sits in waiting area in Nivasha, one of several refugee settlements in the outskirts of the Sudanese capital Khartoum. Roland Schönbauer / UNHCR

Malian refugees in Goudoubo camp carry home new dignity kits, received at a distribution point in the camp. Sylvain Cherkaoui / UNHCR

As the region of Minawao faces critical deforestation due to the global warming and the human activity of 56,000 Nigerian refugees, the UNHCR and its partners Land Life Company and LWF started a reforestation project. In the next two years, they expect to plant -with the refugees- 20.000 trees in and around the site, using the "cocoon" technology to allow the plants to survive in an hostile environment. Xavier Bourgois / UNHCR

Volodymyr Zayika, 71, sustained multiple injuries after setting off a landmine in Pivdenne, Donbas in 2018. While Volodoymry recovering in hospital he and his wife Valentyna discovered they had nowhere to return home to as fighting had forced all the residents of their hometown Pivdenne to flee. Marta Iwanek / UNHCR

Majid, an Iranian asylum seeker, cooks in a temporary reception centre in Hadz?ic´i. Majid fled Iran with his son after he attended a demonstration and was arrested. They have encountered a hospitable reception in Bosnia. Daniel Etter / UNHCR

Oli Ahmed, 53, Gul Zahar, 90, and Mohammad Siddiq, 25, pose for a photo in their shelter. They are part of a family representing four generations of Rohingya. Roger Arnold / UNHCR

Ngolo Silué (left) sits for a family portrait with his sons, Yeo (centre-left) and Silue (centre-right), and his daughters Yrei (right, front) and Nawa (right, rear) in the village of Olleo, home to 3,000 people and located 30 kilometres along a dirt track from the provincial capital. Thanks to a visit by the Côte d’Ivoire Women’s Legal Aid Association, the Silué family, all formerly undocumented, have started the process of obtaining identity papers that will help them apply for jobs, access state healthcare and get driver’s licences. Mark Henley / UNHCR

Life is slowly returning to this street in the Juret Al-Shayah district of Homs, Syria. Christopher Reardon / UNHCR

One per cent of the world's population were displaced from their homes by the end of 2019, the UN refugee agency said on Thursday as they called on countries to do more to help those people get home or build a new life.

The agency's annual Global Trends Forced Displacement report, released ahead of World Refugee Day on Saturday, said a total of 79.5 million people were displaced at the end of 2019, an almost two-fold increase since 2010. The group estimates 38 to 43 per cent of these are children, tens of thousands of whom are unaccompanied.

The total number is up with 11 million "newly displaced" people from 70.8 million displaced by the end of 2018.

More than half of those now displaced, 45.7 million people, had fled to other areas of their own countries. The rest were people displaced elsewhere, 4.2 million of whom are awaiting the outcome of asylum requests, while 29.6 million are refugees and others forcibly displaced outside their country.

The new tally of internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees has increased by 10 million in just a year. The surge in numbers can be attributed to conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sahel, Yemen and Syria and a better accounting of Venezuelans outside of their country.

Refugees, asylum seekers and IDPs from Syria’s nine-year war make up a sixth of the total number at 13.2 million people, the group estimated.

Conflicts keeping refugees from their homes are also lasting longer. In the 1990s about 1.5 million refugees were able to return home each year, compared with 385,000 last year.

“We are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon,” said Filippo Grandi, the  UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

“People cannot be expected to live in a state of upheaval for years on end, without a chance of going home, nor a hope of building a future where they are. We need a fundamentally new and more accepting attitude towards all who flee, coupled with a much more determined drive to unlock conflicts that go on for years and that are at the root of such immense suffering.”

Despite rhetoric from right-wing groups in European nations and the US on high intake of asylum seekers and refugees, only Germany made the top five host countries in 2019 with 1.1 million. Turkey hosted the largest number of refugees worldwide, with 3.6 million people.

Europe registered 9.2 million asylum claims over the past decade, the Americas 3.4 million and the Middle East and North Africa region about 633,000 individual asylum applications.

In terms of refugees in comparison to population, the small island nation of Aruba was found to host the most displaced people per 1,000 residents, mostly from Venezuela, only 29 kilometres away by sea. Refugees account for one-sixth of the population there.

In Lebanon, which hosts a huge number of Palestinian and Syrian refugees, one in every seven people in the country is a refugee.

But as displaced population continues to climb, little is being done to find sustainable, lasting solutions, the agency said. Only half a per cent of the world’s refugees were resettled in 2019 and only 317,200 refugees returned to their home countries, mostly to South Sudan, Syria and the Central African Republic.