By the end of 2017, the number was nearly 3mn higher than the previous year and showed a 50% increase from the 42.7mn uprooted from their homes a decade ago, according to a report by the UN refugee agency.
The current figure is equivalent to the entire population of Thailand, and the number of people forcibly displaced equates to one in every 110 persons worldwide, it said.
“We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities aren’t left dealing with this alone,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
However, around 70% of that number are people from just 10 countries, he told reporters in Geneva ahead of the report’s launch.
“If there were solutions to conflicts in those 10 countries, or in some of them at least, that huge figure, instead of rising every year, could start going down,” he said, calling for more political will to halt the crises driving so many from their homes.
The report showed that 16.2mn people were freshly displaced last year, and included those forced to flee for the first time as well as those who had been previously displaced.
This equates to some 44,500 people being pushed out of their homes every day – or one person every two seconds, the UNHCR pointed out.
Most people flee within their own country, and are defined as internally displaced people, or IDPs.
By the end of 2017, there were some 40mn IDPs worldwide, down slightly from previous years, with Colombia, Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounting for the greatest numbers.
Another 25.4mn people – more than half of them children – were registered as refugees last year.
That is nearly 3mn more than in 2016, and “the highest known total to date”, the report said.
Syria’s seven-year conflict alone had, by the end of last year, pushed more than 6.3mn people out of the country, accounting for nearly one-third of the global refugee population.
Another 6.2mn people are internally displaced in Syria.
The second largest refugee-producing country in 2017 was Afghanistan, whose refugee population grew by 5% during the year to 2.6mn people.
The increase was due mainly to births and more Afghans being granted asylum in Germany, the UNHCR said.
South Sudan meanwhile saw the largest increase last year, with the number of refugees fleeing the world’s youngest nation soaring from 1.4mn at the beginning of the year to 2.4mn at the end.
Grandi said that South Sudan was experiencing “a very bad emergency” which had apparently escaped the notice of both the government and the opposition who did not appear to be “taking seriously the desperate situation of their own people”.
Refugees from Myanmar more than doubled last year to 1.2mn, as an army crackdown forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to pour across the border into Bangladesh.
Yesterday’s report also highlighted large-scale displacements in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and the Congo, among others.
And as Israel marks 70 years of independence, there are some 5.4mn Palestinians still living as refugees, it said.
Despite the focus on migrant numbers arriving in Europe and the United States, a full 85% of refugees are living in low- and middle-income countries like Lebanon, Pakistan, and Uganda, Grandi said.
Turkey is hosting by far the largest number of refugees, with 3.5mn registered there by the end of 2017, most of them Syrians.
