Record Number of People Displaced by Conflict in 2025 Surpasses Natural Disasters
Olivia Lee
A record 32.3 million people were internally displaced by conflict in 2025, surpassing displacement due to natural disasters for the first time. The global total reached 82.2 million, with conflicts in Sudan, Colombia, and Syria driving the surge.
According to a report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), the number of people internally displaced by conflict and violence in 2025 reached a record 32.3 million, a 60% increase from the previous year. This marks the first time since IDMC began collecting data in 2008 that this figure surpassed displacement due to natural disasters, which stood at 29.9 million in the same year.
Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, described these figures as a sign of a global failure to provide basic protection for people. He noted that countless families are returning to destroyed homes, vanished services, or are unable to return, with millions of new displacements in regions such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, Iran, and Lebanon.
Internal displacement refers to each instance where a person is forced to flee within their own national borders. The same person may be displaced multiple times. In total for 2025, there were 82.2 million people living in internal displacement, the second-highest level after the historical peak of 83.5 million in 2024. This was also the first time the number of people displaced from their homes decreased since data collection began 20 years ago.
Despite the decline, the report emphasizes that this should not be mistaken for progress, as behind the numbers are hundreds of thousands of forced returns, destroyed infrastructure, and increased social and environmental pressures. Over 83% of those displaced in 2025 fled due to conflict and violence, with the remainder due to natural disasters.
Nearly half of all people displaced by conflict last year came from Sudan, Colombia, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Sudan topped the list of internally displaced populations for the third consecutive year. The record for conflict-driven displacement stems from new international conflicts and escalating existing ones. In 2025, 46% of displacement incidents related to international armed conflicts, nearly double the previous year. Iran and the DRC accounted for two-thirds of all conflict-related displacement during the year.
Tracy Lucas, Director of IDMC, said that in many cases, people are not displaced just once but can be displaced two or three times, while the systems meant to protect them are being dismantled.
