In its annual report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) warns a record 50.8 million people worldwide are internally displaced due to conflict or disaster, with coronavirus posing a new threat. The IDMC says Covid-19 may add further risks to millions of already vulnerable people.
Over 45 million have been forced to abandon their homes due to violence. A further five million have been displaced by natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, the IDMC says.
It adds that the number of people internally displaced - those who flee conflict or disaster but remain in their own countries - has now reached a record high.
The new coronavirus is likely to make the lives of many of these people - some already living in cramped, unsanitary conditions such as makeshift emergency shelters, informal settlements and urban slums - more difficult. Such overcrowded conditions make it hard to implement the physical distancing and hygiene measures required to prevent the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus. The pandemic also compromises their "precarious living conditions by further limiting their access to essential services and humanitarian aid," the director of the IDMC, Alexandra Bilak, said.
But even without the pandemic, the number of internally displaced people across the globe is a sign, the new report says, of collective failure.
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