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More than 82 million people were internally displaced across 104 countries by the end of 2025, according to the latest IDMC and NRC report.
Conflict and violence drove most of the crisis, with 68.6 million people displaced by war and insecurity, compared with 13.6 million by disasters.
South Asia saw a sharp rise in conflict displacement, driven by India-Pakistan and Afghan-Pakistan tensions, while 78,000 people remained displaced in Manipur.
Sudan, Palestine, Iran and the Democratic Republic of Congo were among the worst-affected places, as the report warned that displacement is increasingly being used as a weapon of war.
Imagine you are at home and suddenly bombs start falling. Or floodwaters reach your doorstep. You run for your life — not to another country, but to the streets of your own. This is “internal displacement”: when a person is forced from their home but remains within the borders of their own country.
By the end of 2025, 82.2 million people across 104 countries — more than the entire population of Germany — were displaced within their own countries. The most worrying finding is that, during 2025, more people were internally displaced by war and violence than by natural disasters.
The latest analysis, Global Report on Internal Displacement 2026, by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), presents a heartbreaking picture to the world. In her message, IDMC’s new director, Tracy Lucas, said: “By the end of 2025, more than 82 million people were internally displaced — a slight decrease from 2024, but still close to record high levels.”
Of these 82.2 million people, 68.6 million had been displaced by conflict and violence, while 13.6 million had been displaced by natural disasters, she pointed out.
Data from the past decade shows this is the first decline in internal displacement in 10 years. In 2016, 38.9 million people were displaced. Today, that figure has more than doubled. This makes clear that the decline does not represent true relief. The report itself acknowledged that the fall is partly the result of data constraints, unsafe returns and temporary solutions.
The IDMC does not only count displaced people. It also counts “displacement events”. This means that if the same person had to flee five times in a year, it would be counted as five displacement events. In 2025, internal displacement events occurred 62.2 million times across 146 countries and territories. While this figure is 6 per cent lower than in 2024, it conceals two sharply opposing trends.
Displacement due to conflict and violence rose by 60 per cent to a record high of 32.3 million. Displacement due to natural disasters fell by 35 per cent to 29.9 million, although this was still 13 per cent higher than the decadal average.
The year 2025 was extraordinary for conflict displacement in South Asia, with a 49-fold increase compared with 2024. This was driven by cross-border fighting. Tensions between India and Pakistan reached a peak after an armed clash in Kashmir in late April 2025. Fighting near the Line of Control displaced 125,000 people in India and approximately 8,000 in Pakistan. The report describes this as the largest cross-border incident since 2019.
On the armed conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the report said: “Clashes at the Torkham border point in early March led to 15,000 displacements in Pakistan and further airstrikes in early October triggered around 161,000 movements in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province.”
The report also referred to internal displacement in Manipur, India. Two and a half years after the Meitei-Kuki communal violence that began in May 2023, 78,000 people remain displaced in the state.
An IDMC team visited the area in October 2025 and found 52,000 people living in relief camps and 26,000 staying with host families.
If one event defines the 2025 report, it is the siege of Tehran, the capital of Iran. Israel launched a military operation in Iran between June 13 and 24, 2025. Israeli military evacuation orders and US warnings forced much of Tehran’s population to flee to the Caspian Sea coastal provinces.
A total of 10 million displacements were recorded in a single country. “It accounted for almost a third of the annual global total and marked the largest single conflict displacement event in such a short period of time that IDMC has ever recorded,” the report said.
Nearly six million people sought refuge in Mazandaran and four million in Gilan province. Mosques and metro stations became shelters for those who remained in the capital.
After the 12-day war, it was believed that everyone had returned.
A total of 2.756 million people were displaced in Palestine during 2025. By the end of the year, however, two million people remained displaced, of whom 1.3 million needed emergency shelter, the report said.
A ceasefire came into effect in Gaza on January 19, 2025, allowing 642,000 people to return to the north. But homes had been destroyed and services were absent.
Hostilities resumed in March. A famine was declared in Gaza in August. Another ceasefire was reached in October, when daily displacement peaked at 182,000.
The situation in the West Bank also worsened. Displacement there was the highest since 1967. Israeli military operations in the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams forced 33,000 Palestinians, the camps’ entire population, to flee.
The military occupation of parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo by the M23 rebel group has wreaked havoc, causing 9.748 million displacements — the highest figure ever recorded for the country and accounting for one-third of global conflict displacement.
In January and February, M23 seized the provincial cities of Goma and Bukavu. In Goma, once a refuge for 714,000 displaced people, the number of internally displaced people fell by 97 per cent. But this was not relief — it was forced return.
“The apparent decline in number of people living in displacement as a result of conflict and violence in DRC from 6.2 million to 4.3 million in 2025 should not be mistaken for progress,” the report said.
Thousands of returnees were unable to go back to their homes, which had either been destroyed or taken over. Land disputes, unexploded ordnance and the proliferation of weapons became new problems. Drastic cuts in US funding only exacerbated the situation.
Sudan has been facing the world’s largest internal displacement crisis for three years. It remained the country with the highest number of internally displaced people in the world for the third consecutive year, with 9.117 million people displaced within the country.
In April, the Rapid Support Forces destroyed the Zamzam displacement camp, following a year-long siege that led to the displacement of a further 500,000 people. In October, El Fasher, the last major government-held city in Darfur, also fell.
In 2025, natural disasters caused 29.9 million displacements. Thirty-six percent of these, or 17.43 million, were in the Philippines alone. In November, the monsoon season brought a series of typhoons, resulting in the highest annual disaster displacement in the country’s history.
In 2025, natural disasters caused 29.9 million displacements. Thirty-six percent of these, or 174.3 million, were in the Philippines alone. In November, the monsoon season brought a series of typhoons, resulting in the highest annual disaster displacement in the country's history.
On July 29, 2025, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. One of the world’s most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, it triggered a tsunami warning across the Pacific Ocean.
Chile was thousands of kilometres away. Yet the government immediately evacuated coastal areas. Some 1.5 million people responded to the early-warning evacuation. The tsunami waves were not as high as feared. By the morning of July 31, all alerts had been lifted and people returned home.
“Chile’s experience shows that when early warning systems, governance structures and community preparedness are strong, preventive temporary displacement can be an effective risk reduction measure that saves lives and minimises disruption,” the report said.
Since 2015, 14 million people have taken part in earthquake-tsunami drills in Chile.
On May 28, 2025, the Birch Glacier suddenly collapsed in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. The Alpine village of Blatten was devastated. Nearly all homes, farms and hotels were destroyed.
But no lives were lost because signs of the glacier’s instability had been detected 10 days earlier, and 300 residents had already been evacuated.
This incident points to a larger truth: climate change is no longer only a problem for poor countries. In mountainous regions, slow-onset disasters can suddenly take on devastating proportions.
Wildfires are no longer just a summer problem. In 2025, wildfires caused 694,000 displacements globally, the second highest number in a decade.
Los Angeles County in the US experienced a fire in January, during winter — something previously unusual. Some 374,000 people were displaced, and 33,000 were still homeless by the end of the year.
South Korea experienced the deadliest forest fire in its history. In March 2025, 40,000 people were displaced, 14,000 hectares of forest burned, and 31 deaths were recorded.
The report devotes an entire chapter to an invisible threat: the weakness of data systems. In 2025, IDMC found that the availability of migration data declined in 15 per cent of the countries it monitors, a threefold increase compared with 2024.
Of the 26 countries surveyed by the International Organization for Migration’s Displacement Tracking Matrix in 2024, 19 saw fewer visits in 2025, and 11 had no surveys at all.
“Without robust and up-to-date data, IDPs risk becoming invisible, observed displacement trends may not reflect reality, and policymaking may rely on incomplete information,” the report said.
UN agencies, which provided 27 per cent of data sources between 2020 and 2024, accounted for 18 per cent in 2025.
The last assessment in Ethiopia was in August 2024, and in Afghanistan in July 2023, even though the situation in both countries continues to change rapidly.
Sub-Saharan Africa was the worst affected region, with 17.3 million displacements, representing 42 per cent of global conflict displacement. Some 31.7 million people are living in displacement there.
The Middle East and North Africa, with 13.7 million displacements, set an all-time regional record. Because of the Iran incident, the region accounted for 40 per cent of global conflict displacement.
East Asia and the Pacific saw 19.6 million displacements, of which disasters accounted for 89 per cent. The Thailand-Cambodia border conflict resulted in the highest conflict displacements in both countries.
Europe and Central Asia saw 46.1 million displacements, with the Ukraine-Russia war the most prominent driver. Some 3.712 million Ukrainians remain displaced within their own country.
In the Americas, Haiti, Colombia and Ecuador each recorded their highest conflict displacement figures.
In the report, Paula Gaviria Betancur, the UN Special Envoy on Internal Displacement, warned: “I have witnessed an alarming rise in arbitrary displacement being used deliberately as a weapon of war. Siege tactics, evacuation orders issued without safeguards, the use of drones and explosive weapons in populated areas…These are not unfortunate by-products of conflict, but violations of international law.”
