Record 40.8 million people internally displaced worldwide in 2015 due to conflicts study shows

A record 40.8 million people across the globe were displaced from their homes and homelands in 2015 due to conflicts or violence, up 2.8 million from the number recorded in 2014. Disasters pushed about 19.2 million people across 113 countries out of their homes.

Internal displacements due to conflicts have been on the rise since 2003, with an average of 14,000 people forced to flee their homes daily to seek refuge in safer territories, the 2016 Global Report on Internal Displacement by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) showed.

The international report revealed that 27.8 million new cases of displacements emerged during 2015 due to conflict, violence and disasters in 127 countries, of which 8.6 million were associated with conflict and violence in 28 countries and 19.2 million with disasters in 113 countries.

Middle East and North Africa witnessed a significant rise in displacements since the 2010 Arab Spring uprisings and the rise of Islamic State (Isis), the report stated, noting that nearly 4.8 million new displacements were recorded in 2015 in the Middle East, which is significantly more than in all other regions of the world combined. "Yemen, Syria and Iraq accounted for over half of the global total," the report read. Ukraine, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Afghanistan, Colombia, Central African Republic and South Sudan also had the highest numbers of displaced people.

Every year since 2003, Colombia, DRC, Iraq, Sudan and South Sudan have featured as countries with the largest internally displaced populations.

As for disasters forcing displacements, the total figure as of the end of 2015 was unavailable but based on a sample of 34 ongoing cases documented in 2015, hundreds of thousands of people were identified as living in protracted displacement for periods ranging between one and 26 years.

Almost 203.4 million, or an average of 25.4 million displacements, have been recorded every year over the past eight years. South and east Asia have been dominating the numbers in terms of absolute figures in the previous years, as India, China and Nepal recorded the highest numbers of displacements due to disasters — 3.7 million, 3.6 million and 2.6 million, respectively.