713 thousand had to leave their homes in Brazil in 2022 – 05/11/2023 – World

Brazil was the country in the Americas where more people had to leave their homes in the last year due to episodes of violence and extreme weather events, shows an annual report by the Center for Monitoring Internal Displacement released this Thursday (11).

Unlike countries like Colombia and Haiti, where most internally displaced people have left their homes due to conflicts, in Brazil most forced movements occur due to phenomena such as heavy rains and floods, intensified in 2022 by the La Niña climate phenomenon.

In all, 713,600 Brazilians had to leave their homes. At least 708,000 did so for reasons linked to climate disasters —the highest number for the country in ten years— and another 5,600 for reasons linked to conflicts, especially disputes over land in the state of Goiás.

It is as if all the inhabitants of cities like Osasco had been forced to leave their places of residence to flee the effects of an armed conflict or natural catastrophes.

The data, compiled since 2013 by the Norwegian Refugee Council project, based in Geneva, corroborate the warning of the effects of the climate emergency, which intensifies the occurrence of extreme events – thus leading to more forced displacements.

After Brazil at the top of the regional ranking are: USA (675,000 internally displaced persons); Colombia (620 thousand); Haiti (121 thousand) and Cuba (90 thousand). In part, the numbers reflect the size of the countries’ populations—the US and Brazil are the two most populous countries in the Americas.

The material published this Thursday also reveals that, globally, the number of internal displacements in 2022 (60.9 million in all) was 60% higher than that recorded a year earlier and also the highest figure since this monitoring started to be done.

As in Brazil, most displacements in the world occur due to environmental or geological disasters (such as earthquakes). These phenomena represent the cause of 32.6 million displacements in the last year — 6 out of 10 due to floods.

The other 28.3 million displacements, driven by conflicts and violence, are driven by the Ukraine War, which internally displaced 16.9 million people in the Eastern European country — the highest number recorded for just one country in the history of this survey. — and across the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the heart of Africa, where civil unrest has displaced more than 4 million.

In the case of Brazil, the two events that most caused displacements were, respectively, the heavy rains in Pernambuco in May 2022, leading to more than 131 thousand movements, and a similar phenomenon in Minas Gerais, in January of the same year, with 107 thousand .

If the situation in Brazil draws attention, so do countries like Ukraine, Haiti and Sudan, for example. The first, the scene of a war for more than a year, represented 60% of displacements forced by conflicts in the world. At the end of the year, around 5.9 million remained displaced within the country — thousands more, after all, decided to cross the border to neighboring nations.

The report recalls that the situation of displaced people in war contexts is much more serious than that of those who manage to remain in their homes during the invasion. But the challenges vary. “In Lugansk [região russófona ao leste da Ucrânia tomada pelos russos], 25% said they struggle to have enough food; while in Kharkiv [no nordeste]44% report difficulties in getting money.”

In Haiti, the Caribbean country that is experiencing an intense political and humanitarian crisis compared by the UN to that of a country at war, the number of internally displaced people, mostly due to the violence of armed gangs, is equivalent to 1% of the total population.

And Sudan, which is experiencing a serious local conflict marked by disputes between the Army, in power after a coup d’état, and paramilitary groups, is today the tenth country with the most internally displaced people in the world. In 2022 alone, 419,000 Sudanese had to leave their homes. The perspective for this year, 2023, is not at all promising.

Last Tuesday (9), the IOM, the UN arm for migration, reported that, in the last three weeks alone, 700,000 people were forced to internally displace in the African country, slightly less than the total number of displaced people in the country. Brazil during the last full year.