Displaced by disasters

Climate emergency replaces wars and conflicts as the biggest global cause for internal displacement of people

- RICHARD MAHAPATRA

DISASTERS WERE responsible for every other person who was displaced in 2022. And in all likelihood, this trend is going to be the new normal in a world that is heating up fast. Assessments show that in recent years, weather-related disasters have displaced more people than conflicts and violence, which have been the dominant reasons historically. This makes climate change the key driver of internal migration of people.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the world's leading source of data and analysis on internal displacement and part of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which started monitoring data on disaster and displacement flows (excluding drought) in 2018, shows that some 1.6 million people displaced by disasters were in camps or places away from their homes by the end of that year. By 2021, as many as 30.7 million new displacements occurred due to disasters.

The figure rose to 32.6 million in 2022, according to IDMC's latest annual "Global Report on Internal Displacement 2023 (GRID-2023)", released in May this year. GRID-2023 shows that the number of people displaced by disasters in 2022 were much more than the number of people 28.3 million-displaced because of wars and conflicts that year. Disaster displacements in 2022 was 40 per cent higher than in 2021. "Since we collated such data, disaster displacement has been repeatedly rising and also being reported from more countries-in 2022, some 150 countries/territories reported such displacement," says Christelle Cazabat, head of programmes, IDMC.