THE war in Ukraine helped push the global total of people left internally displaced by conflict or natural disasters to a record high of 71.1 million last year, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said in a report today that by the end of 2022, 5.9 million people had been forced to move inside Ukraine because of Russia’s invasion.

This raised the global total of people internally displaced by conflict and violence to more than 62m, an increase of 17 per cent since 2021.

Syria had 6.8m people displaced by conflict after more than a decade of civil war.

The number of people displaced inside Syria at the end of the year because of disasters like floods and famine reached 8.7m, up by a massive 45 per cent on 2021.

The total of 71.1m internally displaced worldwide was a 20 per cent increase since 2021.

Internal displacement refers to people forced to move inside their own borders and centre’s report didn’t take into account those who left for different countries.

The United Nations migration agency said this week that 700,000 people have already been internally displaced in a matter of weeks by the conflict in Sudan between the army and a rival paramilitary group.

The centre cited the La Nina weather phenomenon, which continued for a third consecutive year in 2022, as a major factor in disaster displacements. 

La Nina contributed to record levels of flood displacement in Pakistan, Nigeria and Brazil and to the worst drought on record in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the report said.

There was a “perfect storm” of conflict and natural disasters in 2022, leading to “displacement on a scale never seen before,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.