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Conflicts and disasters forced more than 33 million people to flee within their own countries last year, putting them at greater risk amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, monitors said Tuesday.
The new figure brings the total number of people living on internal displacement to a record 50.8 million, according to a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) and the Norwegian Council for Refugees (NRC).
The number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) is much higher than the 26 million who have fled across the borders as refugees.
“Internally displaced persons are often highly vulnerable people living in crowded camps, emergency shelters and informal settlements with little or no access to medical care,” IDMC Director Alexandra Bilak said in a statement.
“The global coronavirus pandemic will make them even more vulnerable,” he said, warning that “it would compromise their already precarious living conditions by further limiting their access to essential services and humanitarian aid.”
The report found that the conflict forced 8.5 million internally displaced persons to flee last year in countries such as Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and South Sudan.
Along with the already displaced, more than 45 million people live in internal displacement caused by the conflict, including almost 6.5 million in Syria, which has been devastated by nine years of civil war.
Another 5.1 million people lived on internal displacement due to natural disasters at the end of 2019, of the almost 25 million who fled their homes due to such disasters throughout the year.
‘Failing for epic proportions’
“Year after year, conflict and violence uproot millions of people from their homes,” NRC chief Jan Egeland said in the statement.
“Collectively, we are failing in epic proportions to protect the world’s most vulnerable,” he lamented, calling for concerted action and insisting that “in this era of coronavirus, continued political violence makes no sense.”
Some 4.5 million were forced to flee their homes by Cyclone Fani in India and Bangladesh, Cyclones Idai and Kenneth in Mozambique, and Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas.
Heavy and prolonged rains and floods in Africa forced an additional two million people to move internally last year, according to the report.
But Bilak told AFP that most of the displacement due to natural disasters was actually “government-led preventive evacuations to save lives and protect people” and that most people can return home relatively quickly “as long as your home has not been completely destroyed.”
Going forward, Bilak warned that the coronavirus pandemic could make it harder for countries to take the necessary steps to evacuate before climate hazards arrive, as thousands of people should not be crowded into shelters.
“How to balance those urgent humanitarian aid efforts with your national effort to fight the spread of COVID will be a difficult balancing act,” he said.
If you want to help fight COVID-19, we have compiled an updated list of community initiatives designed to help medical workers and low-income people in this article. Link: [UPDATED] Anti-COVID-19 initiatives: helping Indonesia fight the outbreak
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