United Nations, June 20 (RHC)-- The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has released a report that warns about 80 million people being forcibly displaced worldwide, about one percent of humanity.

The data, published ahead of the World Refugee Day on June 20th, points out that one in every 97 people is affected by forced displacement.  At the same time "fewer and fewer of those who flee can return home," explains UNHCR.

The organization's annual Global Trend report highlights that 79.5 million were displaced at the end of last year.  Out of that amount, 45.7 million people fled to other areas of their own countries.  The rest were people displaced elsewhere, 4.2 million of them being people awaiting the outcome of asylum requests, while 29.6 million were refugees and others forcibly displaced outside their country.

Particularly, the UNHCR revealed that there has been a worrying new displacement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Sahel region, war-torn Yemen and Syria - which alone accounted for a sixth of the world's displaced.

According to UNHCR, it is estimated that 30 to 34 million children, many of them unaccompanied, are among the displaced, which, as compared by the organization, represents the entire populations of Australia, Denmark and Mongolia combined.

Just in a decade forced displacement has almost doubled. 41 million people were leaving their homes back in 2010 whereas there were 79.5 million in 2019.

As wars and hunger put thousands of families through hardships, "more than three-quarters of the world’s refugees (77 percent) are caught up in situations of long-term displacement – for example the situation in Afghanistan, now in its fifth decade" the report points out.

On the other hand, asylum-seekers submitted 2.0 million new claims. The United States of America was the world’s largest recipient of new individual applications (301,000), followed by Peru (259,800), Germany (142,500), France (123,900), and Spain (118,300).

Turkey, meanwhile, has hosted the largest amount of refugees worldwide, about 3.6 million people.

The UN organization lists among the main causes of the forced displacement the outbreak of the Syrian conflict early in the decade, which continues today; South Sudan’s displacement crisis; the arrival of refugees and migrants in Europe by sea and the massive flow of stateless refugees from Myanmar to Bangladesh.

However, by the end of 2019, Syrians continued to be by far the largest forcibly displaced population worldwide with 13.2 million having to abandon their homes.