UN report flags nearly 50 lakhs displaced in India due to climate change
Nearly 50 lakh people in India were internally displaced due to climate change and disasters in 2021, news agency PTI quoted the annual Global Trends Report by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The UNHCR report states that 10 crore people across the world were forced to flee their homes last year due to violence, food insecurity, human rights abuses, the climate crisis, war in Ukraine etc.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Cell said there were 2.37 crores new internal displacements across the world due to disaster. These figures are in addition to those internally displaced due to conflict and violence. However, this is a decrease of 70 lakh as compared to the previous year’s tally, the report added.
According to the report, the largest displacements due to disasters in 2021 took place in China (60 lakhs), the Philippines (57 lakhs) and India (49 lakhs). The UN report said that most disaster displacements were temporary.
A majority of the internally displaced persons returned to their home areas, but 59 lakh people across the world remained displaced at the end of the year due to disasters, the report said,
The UN agency for refugees said that the number of people forced to leave their homes has increased every year over the past decades and stands at the highest level since the records began. By the end of 2021, those displaced due to war, violence stood at nearly 9 crores, a hike of eight per cent from the previous year’s tally and double the figure of ten years ago.
While the latest global trends report reflects the period of January 2021 to December 2021, the UN agency said it is impossible to ignore the developments that have happened in early 2022, including the Russian war against Ukraine.
“Since then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine – causing the fastest and one of the largest forced displacement crises since World War II – and other emergencies, from Africa to Afghanistan and beyond, pushed the figure over the dramatic milestone of 100 million,” the report said.
The report said that at the end of 2021, 89.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, including 27.1 million refugees, 21.3 million refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, 5.8 million Palestine refugees under United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’s (UNRWA) mandate, 53.2 million internally displaced people, 4.6 million asylum seekers and 4.4 million Venezuelans displaced abroad.
Asylum seekers submitted 1.4 million new claims. The United States of America was the world’s largest recipient of new individual applications (188,900), followed by Germany (148,200), Mexico (132,700), Costa Rica (108,500) and France (90,200).
By May 2022, more than 100 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide by persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.