Wars, other violence and persecution drove worldwide forced displacement to a new high in 2017 for the fifth year in a row, led by the crisis in Congo, South Sudan's war, and the flight into Bangladesh from Myanmar of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees, reports UNB.
In its annual Global Trends report, released on Tuesday, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said 68.5 million people were displaced as of the end of 2017.
Among them were 16.2 million people who became displaced during 2017 itself, either for the first time or repeatedly - indicating a huge number of people on the move and equivalent to 44,500 people being displaced each day, or a person becoming displaced every two seconds.
Refugees who have fled their countries to escape conflict and persecution accounted for 25.4 million of the 68.5 million.
This is 2.9 million more than in 2016, also the biggest increase UNHCR has seen in a single year.
Asylum-seekers, who were still awaiting the outcome of their claims to refugee status as of December 31, 2017, rose by around 300,000 to 3.1 million.
People displaced inside their own country accounted for 40 million of the total, slightly fewer than the 40.3 million in 2016.
In short, the world had more refugees in 2017 than the population of Australia.
It had almost as many forcibly displaced people in total as the population of Thailand.
Across all countries, one in every 110 persons is someone displaced.
"We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities aren't left dealing with this alone," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
"But there is reason for some hope. Fourteen countries are already pioneering a new blueprint for responding to refugee situations and in a matter of months a new Global Compact on Refugees will be ready for adoption by the United Nations General Assembly.
Today, on the eve of World Refugee Day, my message to member states is please support this. No one becomes a refugee by choice; but the rest of us can have a choice about how we help."
UNHCR's Global Trends report is released worldwide each year ahead of World Refugee Day (20th June) and tracks forced displacement based on data gathered by UNHCR, governments, and other partners.
It does not examine the global asylum environment, which UNHCR reports on separately and which continued in 2017 to see incidents of forced returns, politicisation and scapegoating of refugees, refugees being jailed or denied possibility to work, and several countries objecting even to use of the word "refugee".
Nonetheless, the Global Trends report offers several insights, including in some instances into perceived versus actual realities of forced displacement and how these can sometimes be at odds.
Among these is the notion that the world's displaced are mainly in countries of the Global North.
The data shows the opposite to be true - with fully 85 per cent of refugees in developing countries, many of which are desperately poor and receive little support to care for these populations.
Four out of five refugees remain in countries next door to their own.
Large-scale displacement across borders is also less common than the 68 million global displacement figure suggests.
Almost two thirds of those forced to flee are internally displaced people who have not left their own countries.
Of the 25.4 million refugees, just over a fifth are Palestinians under the care of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Of the remainder, for whom UNHCR is responsible, two thirds come from just five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia.
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