Millions Displaced by Violence, Disasters

 

More than 30 million people were displaced within their own countries last year.

That number comes from a new report by the Internal Displacement¹ Monitoring Centre and the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The two groups blame criminal violence and natural disasters for driving millions of people from their homes.

The report also found that nearly 7 million people were newly displaced in 2016.

Jan Egeland is the Director-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

“When a family is pushed out of their home, sometimes for years, it is a sign something is wrong in a nation, the locality, but also in international relations,” Egeland said.

The country with the most newly internally displaced persons in 2016 was the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. More than 922,000 people were driven from their homes because of conflict.

The report found that the DRC had more newly displaced people than Syria and Iraq. Syria was second with 824,000 while Iraq was third with 659,000 displaced persons.

Egeland said three provinces in the DRC -- North and South Kivu and Kasai -- are where most of the displacements² took place.

Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen all had nearly half a million or more internally displaced persons.

Internal displacement is a more common problem than refugees driven from their country, Egeland said.

“Internally displaced people now outnumber refugees by two to one,” he said.

Alexandra Bilak is the director of the International Displacement Monitoring Center. She says displacement can be only the start for some people.

“We need to acknowledge that without the right kind of support and protection, a person internally displace today may become a refugee, an asylum³ seeker or an international migrant tomorrow,” she said.

One major cause for displacement is criminal violence, the report said. That is the case in some places in Central America. In El Salvador, for example, drug-related violence caused 200,000 people to leave their homes in 2016.

The other major cause is natural disasters, such as floods, storms, drought, and wildfires. In 2016, three times more people were displaced by such disasters than in 2015.

Researchers worry that the number of people displaced by weather events will continue to rise because of extreme weather linked to climate change.

The International Displacement Monitoring Center has called for more information about the internally displaced and more money to deal with the problem. The United Nations has called for cutting the number of the internally displaced in half by 2030.

Words in This Story

Displaced –adj. having been forced to leave one’s home

Drought –n. a severe lack of rain for a long period of time

1 displacement   

n.移置，取代，位移，排水量

参考例句：

• They said that time is the feeling of spatial displacement.他们说时间是空间位移的感觉。
• The displacement of all my energy into caring for the baby.我所有精力都放在了照顾宝宝上。

2 displacements   

n.取代( displacement的名词复数 )；替代；移位；免职

参考例句：

• The laws of physics are symmetrical for translational displacements. 物理定律对平移是对称的。 来自辞典例句
• We encounter only displacements of the first type. 我们只遇到第一类的驱替。 来自辞典例句

3 asylum   

n.避难所，庇护所，避难

参考例句：

• The people ask for political asylum.人们请求政治避难。
• Having sought asylum in the West for many years,they were eventually granted it.他们最终获得了在西方寻求多年的避难权。