“armed conflicts may be killing fewer but displacing more than they used to”
The United Nation’s refugee agency today released its annual report on people displaced by war around the world, and the news is bad:
The number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5 million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago.
The increase represents the biggest leap ever seen in a single year. Moreover, the report said the situation was likely to worsen still further.
The report focuses on raw estimates of displaced persons, but I think it makes more sense to look at this group as a share of world population. The number of people on the planet has increased by more than half a billion in the past decade, so we might expect to see some growth in the number of forcibly displaced persons even if the amount of conflict worldwide had held steady. The chart below plots annual totals…
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Pathfinder 
Posted on June 23, 2015