GENEVA – Conflict and violence drove more people to flee within their own countries in 2025 than natural and manmade disasters for the first time on record, monitors said on May 12.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said in their annual report on the subject that at the end of 2025, 82.2 million people were living in internal displacement worldwide.

The figure is just under the highest number ever recorded in 2024.

“Numbers remain at historic highs,” the director of the IDMC, Ms Tracy Lucas, told AFP, calling the trends “a wake-up call”.

Over the course of last year, 65.8 million new internal displacements were reported, including a number of people forced to flee multiple times, the report showed.

Conflict and violence were responsible for 32.3 million of those displacements – up 60 per cent from a year earlier – while 29.9 million fled storms, floods and other disasters.

“Never have we recorded such a staggering number of displacements related to conflict,” said Ms Lucas.

The report detailed how emerging, escalating and entrenched conflicts in places such as Iran and the Democratic Republic of Congo forced people to flee repeatedly within their countries.

Such displacements remain highly concentrated.

As they were hit by deepening instability in 2025, Iran and the DR Congo alone accounted for two-thirds of all new conflict-driven internal displacements, counting around 10 million each, the report said.

Of the 69.7 million people who at the end of 2025 were living in internal displacement because of conflicts across 54 countries, nearly half were in just five countries, it sai...